Dips into the mid-twentieth century New York School (including its work with graphic scores) and into unintentionally sprightly electronica characterise a surprisingly sober, instrumentally-based April show for Kammer Klang.
Kammer Klang presents:
Kammer Klang: Caterina Barbieri + Zwerm Ensemble (playing John Dowland, Earle Brown and Joanna Baillie) + RAM Experimental Music Ensemble (playing Morton Feldman) Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Tuesday 3rd April 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
Opening, the Royal Academy of Music’s Experimental Music Ensemble present Morton Feldman‘s rarely-performed, highly textured septet piece ‘The Straits Of Magellan’. Dating back to 1961, the piece’s graphical score is an array of coded time boxes, each containing representative symbols for single or simultaneous notes/durations/colourations; while the dynamics of the composition are explicitly and sternly noted (with minimal note attacks, a generally quiet approach but multiple instructions for glissandi, harmonics etc), the pitches are left entirely up to the players’ choices. Here’s one of the many possible interpretations:
In the middle of the bill are Belgian electric guitar quartet Zwerm Ensemble (avant-garde favourites whose collaborations and performance credits include Fred Frith, Mauro Pawlowski, Larry Polansky, Eric Thielemans, Yannis Kyriakides and Etienne Guilloteau) The four members (Toon Callier, Johannes Westendorp, Bruno Nelissen and Kobe van Cauwenberghe) will present arrangements of ‘Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens’ (by peerless Renaissance lute composer John Dowland), ‘December 1952’ (by twentieth century “open form” pioneer Earle Brown,and, like the Feldman piece, sourced from a graphic score) plus a performance of ‘Last Song From Charleroi’, a new seventeen-minute work for four electric guitars and tape composed by Joanna Bailie. Examples of playing, pieces and general composer tone below…
Headlining, Italian composer and voltage-controlled-sequencer specialist Caterina Barbieri will perform a solo electronic set of her “ecstatic computation” music. Berlin-based, she explores “themes related to machine intelligence and object oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism” and “psycho-physical effects of repetition and pattern-based operations in music, by investigating the polyphonic and polyrhythmic potential of sequencers to draw severe, complex geometries in time and space.”
In practise, this is surprisingly accessible. Her work (including her recent ‘Patterns Of Consciousness’ album, composed entirely on Verbos Harmonic Oscillator and ER-101 Indexed Quad Sequencer) initially sounds closer to the pop-synth airiness of Kraftwerk or Tangerine Dream records from the ‘70s; even to the rhythmic clink of Larry Heard or the warm chitter of Jean-Michel Jarre. But even if there are similarities to ‘Pong’ or ‘Popcorn’ – especially live – this is merely a side effect of structure. Caterina’s work is intended as an austere examination of qualities: its primitive but plaintive blippery coming about due to her wish to avoid signature synth sounds, concentrating instead on careful shifts of accenture, attack and shaping on basic sine tones, accelerating and decelerating. The emotional content – like the unexpected danceability – apparently comes despite her intentions. Live, she fits right in with populist EM; sometimes, though, in the studio, she can come across as more raw, glitchy and forbidding. Perhaps in the tougher Kammer Klang environment, more of this side will will emerge.
News on spring concerts by Manchester modern classical ensemble Psappha (one of the more gracefully eclectic groups of their kind). Summary (and slightly tweaked press release mashups) follow…
“Meaning ‘The Hammer Without a Master’, Boulez’ iconic work is a classic of the twentieth century whose sonority and sense of time and direction were profoundly influenced by music from Asia and Africa: named after a text by surrealist poet René Char, it features mezzo-soprano with six instrumentalists in the unusual combination of alto flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylorimba, and percussion. Berio’s ‘Naturale’ pairs live musicians with recordings of Sicilian street vendors highlighting the contrast between flowing folk melodies and the raw, natural voice of the street singer. Takemitsu’s ‘Towards the Sea’ recalls the ebb and flow of the ocean and was commissioned by the Greenpeace Foundation for their Save the Whale campaign.
“Tom Harrold’s new work ‘Dark Dance’ (supported by the Fidelio Charitable Trust) has been commissioned by Psappha to complement the Boulez. Psappha’s Artistic Director Tim Williams says “Tom has more than risen to the challenge… his piece is exhilarating and full of rhythmic energy across its eight-minute span”, while Tom himself adds “this is perhaps one of the most unusual pieces I have ever written. I’ve really taken the opportunity to experiment. It’s been a cleansing and enlightening experience for me and I’m enormously grateful to Psappha for commissioning me to write the piece.”
Here are two previous examples of Tom’s work to provide some pointers: his chamber ensemble piece ‘Bone Meal’ and his bass-trombone-and-tape duet ‘Hard Hit’, both of which demonstrate the lively, dancing wit of his writing and sensibilities.
Psappha will continue their ‘Demystifying New Music’ initiative by screening Barrie Gavin’s 2005 biographical film ‘Pierre Boulez: Living in the Present’ prior to the concert: ticketholders can turn up to this free event at 6.00pm.
In April, Psappha will stage ‘A Wonderful Day’, exploring the connections between jazz, rock, classical and street music, and teaming up with conductor Stephen Barlow and with “the best jazz guitarist this side of the Atlantic” – Salford’s own Mike Walker. Mike (plus his reeds-playing cohort Iain Dixon and drummer Mike Smith) will play alongside Psappha on the premiere of a new Walker ensemble composition ‘Autonomy’, which “combines classical music with the improvisation and rhythmic drive of jazz”. Mike Walker also returns as the soloist on Steven Mackey’s classical/rock fusion piece ‘Deal’, while Psappha play alone for the late Fausto Romitelli’s palindromic work ‘Amok Koma’ (which draws inspiration from German punk rock).
The event as a whole is named after the Anna Clyne piece which completes the programme, in which a small ensemble play a hushed, affectionate supportive structure to the integrated tape of the songs and conversation of a Chicago street musician “whose natural, slow voice conveys a sense of both joy and struggle” (and which, much like the fragment of tramp-sung hymn in Gavin Bryar’s ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, gives the work its emotional core and its sense of small, fragile, hopeful humanity persevering against a largely indifferent world).
Here’s the previous Psappha-commissioned Walker orchestral piece ‘Ropes’ (featuring the ensemble’s “22 strings” in collaboration with his jazz quintet); plus other recordings of the Romitelli and Clyne pieces.
For May’s ‘Here and Now’ event, the audience is invited to “take a tour of the Whitworth art gallery through music and art. Promoted by music therapist Rachel Swanick as part of the ‘Here and Now’ wellbeing project this is a unique event where visual art and music sit side by side, sparking your imagination and enticing you to look again, with new eyes… Psappha invites you on a musical adventure through the gallery, stopping off along the way to experience each new work performed live by world-class musicians.
“Played alongside Joshua Frankel’s award-winning film, Judd Greenstein’s ‘Plan of the City’ imagines the architecture of New York blasting off into outer space and resettling on Mars! David Fennessy’s ‘5 Hofer Photographs’ takes inspiration from Evelyn Hofer’s eclectic photos of 1960s Dublin which will be projected as part of the performance, and Michael Gandolfi’s ‘History of the World in Seven Acts’ prompts the viewer/listener to experience the natural ebb and flow between colourful geometric animation and music.”
In addition, four new pieces inspired by items in the Whitworth Collection are being contributed by “young, upcoming composers” – David John Roche (a duo piece), Dani Howard, Will Frampton and Bethan Morgan-Williams. Information on these is still scanty, but here are samples of previous compositions by the four (two of them performed by Psappha):
‘Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître’ – Hallé St Peter’s, 40 Blossom Street, Manchester, M4 6BF, England, Thursday 22nd March 2018, 7:30pm – information here and here
‘A Wonderful Day’ – The Stoller Hall, Chetham’s School Of Music, Long Millgate, Manchester, M3 1DA, England, Friday 20th April 2018, 7:30pm – information here and here
‘Here And Now’ – The Whitworth, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M15 6ER, Thursday May 17th 2018, 6:30pm – information here and here
From March to May, women’s music collective Scordatura continue their mission to present, perform and illuminate work by female composers, via a series of monthly concerts in London or Oxford.
The March date in London is “an evening of wind chamber music from some of Europe’s most exciting female composers.” Living composers will be represented by Judith Weir’s ‘Mountain Airs’ (a free adaptation of two traditional Scottish melodies, which dates back to 1988); but there’ll also be wind quintets by a pair of bold and prolific twentieth-century French composers (Claude Arrieu and Hedwige Chrétien) as well as by English serialist grande-dame Elisabeth Lutyens.
In addition, there’ll be a performance of ‘Trio For Winds’ by the late Prague-based Scottish composer Geraldine Mucha, whose work was obscured for much of her lifetime (partly due to Cold War politics and partly due to so much of her energy and social value having being subsumed into other work as chatelaine and foundation head for her talented father-in-law, the Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha).
In April, three Scordatura members – cellist and artistic director Rachel Watson, clarinettist Poppy Beddoe, and pianist Cecily Lock – will be playing a set of chamber trios in Oxford. Two are by living composers – ‘Arenas d’un Tiempo’ by Cuban-Afro-American Tania León and ‘Canta, Canta!’ by Thea Musgrave.
The remainder are historical – ‘Passacaglia on an Old English Tune’ (by the slim-catalogued but accomplished post-Impressionist Rebecca Clarke); ‘Sonata for Clarinet and Cello’ (by the smart, witty and superbly spirited Phyllis Tate); ‘Andante for Clarinet and Piano’ (by the elegant twentieth-century neoclassicist Alice Mary Smith); and ‘Three Pieces for Cello and Piano’ (by Nadia Boulanger, whose exemplary work as a teacher of other composers from Philip Glass and Elliott Carter to Aaron Copland tends to overshadow her own compositional reputation).
Scordatura return to London (and the Old Church) in May for an evening of cello ensemble music. This will include pieces composed and performed by a guest – Manchester cellist Polly Virr (another latter-day tech-savvy polydisciplinary, who works with Rachel Watson in flashmob ensemble The Street Orchestra of London and whose work outside of the immediate classical sphere covers the string loop pedal duo Täpp as well as work with indie-folk band Ideal Forgery plus various Manchester singer-songwriters).
Landscape- and travel-inspired, Polly’s pieces include standard playing and cello-body percussion plus occasional extended technique and voice, in a similar manner to other post-classical/pop-friendly solo cellists like Laura Moody, Philip Sheppard, Zosia Jagodzinska and Serena Jost. She also draws additional inspiration from post-classical electronic dance artists such as Phaeleh. I’ve pasted in a couple of her Soundcloud shots below.
The other items on the programme include the Cello Quartet by Grażyna Bacewicz (a violin soloist and onetime Boulanger student who became one of the first internationally-recognised Polish female composers) and ‘Chant’ by the humble, undersung Scottish composer and multi-instrumentalist Marie Dare (for whom I’ve found a lone biography here) As with the other two concerts, there are a couple of pieces by living women, both of them cello quartets – the slow windings of Tina Davidson’s ‘Dark Child Sings’, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s ‘Las Sombras de los Apus’ (an early piece rising from dark tones to swarming explosions and dance rhythms, balancing – as with most of her music – the European and Latina aspects of her own multicultural heritage).
Dates as follows:
‘The Grand Tour: European Music for Wind Quintet’ – The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES, England, Sunday 25th March 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
‘Scordatura at St Michael’s’ – St Michael & All Angels Church, 33 Lonsdale Road, Summertown, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX2 7ES, England, Friday 20th April 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
‘Celli! Music for Cello Ensemble’ – The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16 9ES, England, Saturday 19th May 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
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UPDATE, 16th March 2018 – …and, if you can’t wait that long, I’ve just found out that the people behind the London New Wind Festival are staging a London evening of new music by women composers, as part of International Woman’s Month; a couple of evenings before the first of the Scordatura concerts.
Yuko Ohara – Rising Eels (for oboe & trombone) Margaret Lucy Wilkins – “366” (for solo trombone) Dorothee Eberhardt – Campion (for bass clarinet & piano) (UK premiere) Violeta Dinescu – Lichtwellen (for solo B-flat clarinet) (UK premiere) Michiko Shimanuki – First Snow (for solo piano) (world premiere)
Catherine Pluygers – Japan (for ensemble) Janet Graham – From Dawn to Dusk (for flute, oboe and piano) Erika Fox – Remembering the Tango (for flute and piano) Ming Wang – Die Verwandelten (for solo bass flute) Enid Luff – The Coming of the Rain (for solo oboe).
London New Wind Festival presents:
‘New Music by Women Composers’ Schott Music Ltd, 48 Great Marlborough Street, Soho, London, WIF 7BB, England
Friday 23rd March 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
This music’s currently so obscure that this is the only soundclip I could find for it…
There are still some tickets left for the rollicking, rampaging twentieth-anniversary concerts for venerable yet vital psychedelic noise label Rocket Recordings. These will be packing out the Garage and its sister venue Thousand Island in north London for three consecutive days over an early March weekend.
It’s not the first time that Highbury Corner’s been rammed with psychoactive weirdness and well-plumbing musical explorations. In its earlier incarnation as Upstairs at the Garage, the smaller Thousand Island saw hundreds of strange and wonderful leftfield acts pass through; to pick just one example, twenty years ago the building hosted occult ensemble Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels and their ‘Highbury Working’ “beat seance” in which Alan Moore and David J explored and mined the hidden histories of the Holloway Road from the horse goddess Epona to the rapidly poisoned utopianism of the Black House, from the schemata of Aleister Crowley to the madness of Joe Meek. So the Corner’s no stranger to strangeness… but it’s good, for a full weekend, to see strangeness rise so outrightly overground amongst the traffic fumes, creeping gentrification and salsa nights.
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The Rocket days kick off on Friday 9th. Fluxus-inspired Italian garage groove-band Julie’s Haircut mingle smearing, chuckling Ash Ra Tempel guitars and flutes with a Georgio Moroder wobble, while from Sweden there’s creamy-toned garage darlings Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation (whose more recent recordings pulse along on a fluting, closed-eyed Can patter) and the detailed anticipations of Flowers Must Die, who burst shining locked disco grooves through hanging tapestries of improvised “oriental-influenced” psychedelia (like an unexpected frug in a Tibetan temple). A couple of spinoff acts from Salford industrial/sociological alchemists Gnod are playing– the fleshy beats, brutual mechanisms and cellar drones of Chris Haslam’s electronica project Dwellings and the “slow burning vocal loops (and) devotional mindscapes” of A.P Macarte’s AHRKH. Also on the bill is the spontaneous, impulse/emotion-driven semi-improvised “dirty techno” of Coldnose, swilling in acid house, industrial, electro, drum and bass and distorted vocal snarls. For the after-show winddown, there’s DJ-ing from assorted Teeth Of The Sea members, but more on them later…
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Sorry, but it’s returns only for Saturday 10th. Although Hills (with their gruff and deafening meditational rock, like Joy Division trapped inside a raga) have had to pull out, their Swedish compatriots Goat (costumed acid/world fusioneers who’ve already made a big splash at Glastonbury) are still in play. So are Italian “kosmitronic” rockers Mamuthones – a delightful confection of slippery tinkling rhythms, chatterbox riffage explosions of lateral noise and sing-song babble, they’re what Dutch Uncles might have sounded like if they had less of a taste for arch Roxy-isms and had taken more of a liking to Pere Ubu. There are also slots for the onetime heavy doom-psych of Hey Colossus (who, like their spiritual forebears The Birthday Party, are evolving steadily out of the chaotic London murk they began in and starting to tell stories) and the bellowing, unreconstructed Tyneside sludge-acid of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. Minimalist Malmö trance-rockers Ved preview their imminent Rocket EP ‘DDTT’, and there are sets from amelodic No Wave revisitors Housewives, block-partying noise duo Gum Takes Tooth and the elasticated buzzing Russian “stargaze” band Gnoomes.
In addition, there’ll be a rare solo appearance by Teeth Of The Sea’s modular analogue synth guy Mike Bourne who – in parallel to his band work – has recently put out a couple of odds and ends on Bandcamp including the gradually-evolving ‘pætʃ’ album of electronic experiments (including black-and-white vampire music and harmonium/Harmonium-esque sketches with a dash of Geiger-counter, and the vast shadow-steeped minimalism of his soundtrack to Ben Lister’s horror short ‘Wine Dark Sea’). Opening the evening, the blipping electronics, kettle-banging, forceful ranting and rises to aggressive crescendos of Temple Ov BBV (a collaboration between Gnod and Dutch experimental psychedelicists Radar Men From The Moon) resemble a more spacious meeting between early Swans and cultural rhythmatist John Chernoff). DJ-ing for the evening comes from a four-strong squad of Cherrystones, Jamie Paton, Mike Keeling and Chris Reeder.
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The highlight of the Sunday show – at least as far as Rocket themselves are concerned – has been their success in securing the British live debut for the duo project by Polish reeds/keyboard player Wacław Zimpel and his compatriot, the “magic brutalist” Stara Rzeka guitarist/singer Kuba Ziołek, as Zimpel/Ziołek. They’ll be showcasing the psychoactive-minimalist jazz-folk stew of last year’s eponymous album.
That said, there’ll be pretty strong competition from trumpet-toting electronic rock partisans Teeth Of The Sea. Having DJ-ed on the first night, they’re returning at full band strength for what will presumably provide another exhilarating set and another chance for us all to slither around in a puddle of non-stick definitions (are they noise? are they rave? are they dream-metal? are they what you might’ve had if Miles Davis had rashly agreed to a Foetus production job?). Also returning are Gnod – this time in person, playing a “greatest hits” set, which you can vote for here).
There’s further Gnodness via yet another pair of spin-offs: Paddy Shine’s immersive “tantric vocal loop” project Ayn Sof and Marlene Ribeiro’s work as Negra Branca (around which circulates various splutters including “squashy analogue”, “temple goddess” and “dreamscape”). Veteran psych bass player Gareth Turner is making two appearance – one as a third of the Anthroprophh trio (in which he’s joined by Heads guitarist Paul Allen and drummer Jesse Webb to blend “garage-bound filth (with) wayward, abstract artistry”), and the other as half of Kuro (in which he grabs a double bass and joins forces with violinist Agathe Max for electrically-enhanced string-drones). Finally, there’s also space for Liverpudlian heavy-psychedelic noise-rockers Bonnacons Of Doom and shamanic ritual trio H.U.M. (Mark Wagner, Heloise Zamzam and Uiutna) whom I last described as “a kind of psychic cross-cultural art coven, citing “alchemical practice, incantation, chanting, drones, ritual drumming, French variété” as both inspiration and activity.”
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Further details and ticket/info links below… if you’re reading about this for the first time, you’re already stragglers, so get going…
Baba Yaga’s Hut & DHP present:
‘Rocket Recordings Twenty’ The Garage/Thousand Island, 20-22 Highbury Corner, Highbury, London, N5 1RD, England
Friday 9th March 2018, 7.30pm
Saturday 10th March 2018, 3.30pm
Sunday 11th March 2018, 7.30pm
– information here and here
Filthy Lucre presents:
Filthy Lucre: “Lingua Inota – A Night of Imagined Languages” Hackney Showroom @ Hackney Downs Studios, 13-15 Amhurst Terrace, Hackney Downs, London, E8 2BT, England
Saturday 24th February 2018, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
“Every song in the night uses invented languages to express the things that real words can’t touch… The divinity of nonsense has served, like music, to say the unsayable. Whether associated with religious ecstasy or utopian projects, these utterances are inscrutable yet intimate.”
For a while now, freewheeling concert/club night/collective Filthy Lucre (run by composer Joe Bates, clarinettist Anthony Friend and composer/conductor William Cole) have been putting together events “tied together by artistic concepts, such as cultic rituals and urban sprawl.” I’ve not caught up with them before now, but this event’s an ideal opportunity to get a feel for how they think.
Incorporating chamber choir and synthesisers, the Filthy Lucre ensemble will be performing ‘Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? (Do You Believe In The Immortality Of The Soul?)’ the final, morbidly romantic langue inventée work from renegade Canadian composer Claude Vivier (infamously found in manuscript form on his desk in the aftermath of his murder, which it seemed to predict in its envisioning of a narrator stabbed in the heart by a potential lover). Also in place on the bill will be an exploration of the original lingua ignota of visionary theologian, polymath and composer Hildegard of Bingen (she of the hallucinatory Christian visions and the remarkable command of twelfth century experience from its musicality to its medicine, its theological orientations to the outer fringes of its philosophy).
In addition, Filthy Lucre will be tackling the “nonsense” of the David Bowie/Brian Eno collaboration ‘Warszawa‘ (born from Bowie’s blind phonetic transcriptions of Polish folk song) and the “electric babble” of Talking Heads. I guess they could mean the band’s pulsing Afrodelic loft-music setting of Hugo Ball’s ‘Gadji beri bimba’ (from ‘Fear Of Music’) but it could extend to any of David Byrne’s chopped songtexts – in particular, those on 1980’s haunted, free-form-sermonizing ‘Remain In Light’ and its funk’n’free-association follow-up ‘Speaking In Tongues’ (which could also have lent its name to the event).
There will also be new music by Laurence Osborn (‘ELITE’, scored for tenor, keyboard, two synthesizers and tape), art by Georgia Hicks (inspired by the illustrated manuscripts of Hildegard’s visions, which depict reality as a wheel) and a Hildegard-themed film by Paul Vernon. Various musical arrangements come courtesy of event coordinator Joe Bates himself, and from Emma-Jean Thackray.
Some examples of what’s on offer or what might be propelling the thoughts behind it can be found below…
(Update – 19th February 2018 – have just been able to share the Paul Vernon Hildegard trailer too. Looks as if music by Xenakis and Cocteau Twins has been added to the brew…)
Sprawling out over a long month between early February and early March, Théâtre Volière’s Marchland performance season will transform the City of London’s Bridewell Theatre into a recreation of “a secluded European theatre” aiming – via discussion and performance, music and acting, photography, discussion and art – “to explore what it means to be European today… everything that is good and bad about the human response to being pushed up against “otherness”…. (to) come together to share and unpick these European stories in an attempt to answer the question, “how do we live together?”…” Slipping in under the frowning threat of a hard, bruising Brexit and the rising of surly, xenophobic British fences, it’s a welcome and timely thing.
In principle, ‘Marchland’ is theatrical. Threaded through the season are performances of Volière’s own ‘Arnika’ dealing with the corrosive effects of dreadful secrets and guilt, post-Nazi occupation, in an Alsace town (exemplifying “the tragic choices forced on a border community trapped in a cycle of international vengeance” and of its quadralingual companion piece ‘Retour au pays‘, “exploring the multi-lingualism of border regions and its effect on their cultures” via the story of Alsatian poet Andre Weckmann and his journey – as a forced military draftee – through the Wehrmacht, the Russian front and the Free French). Also on offer are two pieces by La Soupe Compagnie: ‘Macao et Cosmage‘ (their headphone-driven children’s tale of colonialism – “part Japanese kamishabaï paper theatre, part pop-up storybook” – performed in a tiny twelve-person booth), and their poetry-and-puppetry-incorporating ‘Evocation’, a transposition of ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (Albert Giraud’s Symbolist poem-cycle of conscious, candid estrangement and displacement) to a Victorian-era Brighton Beach where it’s fed through the experience and cyclic memories of a traumatised young female refugee (scored by electro-acoustic composer Antoine Arlot). There’ll also be a festival-spanning interactive attempt (featuring the combined efforts of Marchlands artists and audience) to create and represent a borderland country of the imagination.
Yet – point for point and performer for performer – the majority of the festival is musical, bringing together a fascinating sweep of players from across Europe and interspersing them with British musicians exploring transcontinental roots and history (whether these are their own – as in the case of British-based Sephardic ensemble Sefiroth – or where their curiosity, studies and sympathies have led them.
Here’s a breakdown of the musical events, condensed from various bits of the programme text.
Carneval String Trio
“Carneval String Trio (made up of violinist Kamila Bydlowska, viola player Shiry Rashkovsky and cellist Timothée Botbol) have created a fascinating programme of twentieth-century music for us. Vanished kingdoms and shifting borders here, in an Eastern Europe where identities and allegiances were torn apart under the most savage circumstances imaginable.
“They’ll be playing pieces by Zoltán Kodály, Ernő Dohnányi and Gideon Klein, works that shock and mesmerize in equal measure. Each of these composers used folkloric themes to express their unique national identities, and yet these identities were rewritten for them many times as borders shifted and ideologies fought over their homelands. This is music that challenges us to ask “what is left of our identity when it is warped and usurped by the forces of nationalism?”
“The cultural and political history of the former Yugoslavia features large in this year’s ‘Marchland’. Greek guitarist Nikos Baroutsakis joins the conversation with a recital of music from the Balkans and the wider region, where Europe meets the Middle East. He’ll be playing pieces inspired by the folk culture of Armenia, the Balkans (including the former Yugoslavia) and Turkey.
“Carlo Domeniconi’s Variations on ‘Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım (I’m On A Long Narrow Road)’ – a Turkish folk song of pain and suffering – opens the programme. It is followed by four traditional Armenian dances arranged for guitar by Iakovos Kolanian. Finally, a rare performance of Dusan Bogdanovic’s ‘Six Balkan Miniatures’, composed for and dedicated to, world peace during the Yugoslavian Civil War.
“Fran & Flora are cellist Francesca Ter-Berg and violinist Flora Curzon. BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction described them as fiercely passionate and a string duo bound for glory, and that says it all about their approach to music making and their musical influences. For ‘Marchland’, they will be exploring musical styles from Eastern Europe, and how they are influenced by ongoing exchanges and tensions across borders and migrating communities. Expect soulful laments, exquisite songs, irresistible dance tunes, and tales of their musical adventures as outsiders intent on incorporating traditional music-making into their own, unique style.
“In addition, they’ll also perform in a double bill of music and conversation with Nikos Baroutsakis (extending their programme, their distinctive music-making interspersed with anecdotes and insights from their musicological travels in the Balkans) and, in another event, pairing up with Alex Batesmith’s dramatised talk ‘Blackbirds and Blue Helmets’ (about his experiences as a UN war crimes prosecutor in Kosovo and his travels in the former Yugoslavia).
“This is a melting-pot of rare and deeply-affecting music, woven around an ancient folktale. A resourceful harper charms his audience to sleep in order to steal their magical harp – The Oak of Two Greens. The harp belongs to the king of the Tuatha da Dannan; a legendary tribe which, according to legend, brought music to Ireland. Bardos Band follow the route this music might have travelled, using voice, harp, medieval fiddle, gittern, flutes and symphony to create an enchanting wash of sound.”
(Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any embeddable examples of the Bardos’ treatment of ‘The Oak Of Two Greens’, but it’s close enough to Christmas for me to offer you this…)
“The Bardos Band’s Sophia Brumfitt and Leah Stuttard also make up the early-music due Maiden In The Moor. For their own ‘Marchlands’ performance they’re reviving the music of Occitania, a vanished kingdom that once straddled Southern France and Northern Spain.
Maiden In The Moor
“The Occitan Troubadours sang of loyalty, love and longing, and their language and music survived through travelling poets and illuminated songbooks long after their culture was devastated by the Albigensian Crusade. Their work had a profound influence on European music and culture, and echoes of it can be heard in lieder, folk music, and the work of the singer-songwriters of our own time. The programme includes Troubadour and Trouvère songs, songs from the courts of Aquitaine and the Languedoc, and Spanish pilgrim songs.”
(Although there’s not much Maiden In The Moor material online, here’s an example of Occitan songcraft…)
“Norway’s KultNett bring together some of the foremost folk musicians and storytellers from beyond the Arctic Circle to examine the history of the peoples of Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people. Storytelling, a fast and furious fiddle and the traditional ‘joik’ of the Sámi are interwoven to create a performance that explores and interrogates the dynamics of cultural and ethnic hegemony in the Nordic region of Europe.
Ignacio Evangelista: ‘After Schengen’
“Adapted especially for Marchland and illustrated by a multi-media presentation, this is a truly immersive experience; a rare insight into a rich and vibrant borderland culture from the Northernmost reaches of Europe. They’ll also play in a separate double bill with Bardos Band, presenting an extended version of their Marchland programme.
“Inspired by Ignacio Evangelista’s photography sequence ‘After Schengen’, we brought together three artists to create an interdisciplinary event, ‘Before and After Schengen’, exploring the politics and the poetry around notions of the vanishing border.
Shiry Rashkovsky
“In front of a screening of his work, Ignacio will be talking about his fascination with Europe’s disused border posts. His talk will be interwoven with poems by Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes, written in response to Ignacio’s images and read by George himself. The whole will be framed by a unique performance of musical fragments and improvisations devised by Carneval String Trio violist Shiry Rashkovsky (also an associate member of the Philharmonia Orchestra).
This is a truly international collaboration that encapsulates perfectly the spirit of ‘Marchland’). Expect to find yourselves pondering the ephemeral and often arbitrary nature of borders. ‘Before and After Schengen’ will also be performed as a separate double bill with another extended performance of Kultnett’s ‘Sound of the Arctic’.
“Sefiroth is an international collective of musicians founded by brothers Nick and Alex Roth to explore traditional Sephardic repertoire. music from the descendants of the Jews who left Spain or Portugal after 1492. Sung in Ladino (a language primarily spoken by Sephardic Jews), these ancient songs weave stories of love, loss and yearning for home, and evoke the lands where the diaspora settled: Iberia, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
“The group’s arrangements are as porous and wide-ranging as the history of the Sephardim, combining acoustic and electric instruments, improvisation, modern harmonies and trance-inducing rhythms. They’ll also be performing separately alongside Maiden In The Moor in a double bill; setting the revived music of a vanished culture alongside the living, evolving traditions of a banished people.
“Sweden and Denmark’s Åkervinda perform their unique, modern Scandinavian folksongs. Jazz singers at heart, and influenced by artists such as Björk and The Real Group, they share a deep love of folk music. Through improvisation, they breathe new life into traditional songs, singing stories of women through the ages in a programme of haunting harmonies and dazzling improvisations inspired by women’s history and the shifting populations of Europe. Their appearance at Marchland marks the opening of a UK tour and the release of their latest album. They’ll also be performing in a separate double bill with Maiden In The Moor.
“What can we say about our show ‘A Vanished Kingdom’? Not much, since it’s actually mostly your show and you’ve yet to devise it! Come and help make a season-long, open-access interdisciplinary event to be presented on the closing day of the season.
“On three consecutive Saturdays we’ll be meeting to create our own Vanished Kingdom – an imaginary borderland with its own culture, geography, history, language… All devised by you. If you’re a visual artist, writer or performer, if you’re someone who wants to share ideas in a supportive and respectful environment, if you’re someone who enjoys playing and make believe, then join us and artists from the Marchland season to help make something truly unique. You are welcome to come and go as you please for the duration of each workshop, and even to just quietly observe the controlled chaos! It’s completely free to participate.
On the 3rd March, we’ll be presenting the audience with a free ‘Vanished Kingdom’ event featuring the stories, songs, dances, artwork, history, geography of a European borderland of our participants’ collective imagination. As an opener to the presentation, there’ll be another chance to hear a performance by Åkervinda (giving us their perspective on women’s history and cross border co-operation) plus a one-off set from three members of Sefiroth (Alex Roth, Alice Zawadzki & Olesya Zdorovetska).
“Expect, perhaps, robust and lively debate about the tensions between regional identity and cross-cultural fertilisation, absurd flights of fancy and charming anecdotes, and a rich tapestry of differing viewpoints and traditions. Looking forward to meeting you at the crossroads!”
All events are at The Bridewell Theatre, 14 Bride Lane, Blackfriars, London EC4Y 8EQ, England. Dates are as follows.
Nikos Baroutsakis – Thursday 8th February 2018, 1:15pm
Fran & Flora – Friday 9th February 2018, 1:15pm
KultNett’s ‘Sound of the Arctic’ – Friday 9th February 2018, 7:30pm; Tuesday 13th February 2018, 1:15pm; 16th February 2018, 1:15pm; 17th February 2018, 9:00pm
Bardos Band’s ‘The Oak of Two Greens’ – Monday 12th February 2018, 1:15pm
Before and After Schengen – Thursday 15th February 2018, 1:15pm
Sefiroth – Friday 16th February 2018, 7:30pm; Saturday 17th February 2018, 2:00pm; Friday 23rd February 2018, 7:30pm
Maiden in The Moor – Wednesday 28th February 2018, 1:15pm
Åkervinda – Friday 2nd March 2018, 1:15 pm
Double-bill concerts:
Nikos Baroutsakis + Fran & Flora – Saturday 10th February 2018, 2:00pm
Bardos Band’s ‘The Oak of Two Greens’ + KultNett’s ‘Sound of the Arctic’ – Saturday 10th February 2018, 7:30 pm
‘Before and After Schengen’ + KultNett’s ‘Sound of the Arctic’ – Thursday 15th February 2018, 7:30 pm
Alex Batesmith’s ‘Blackbirds and Blue Helmets’ + Fran & Flora – Tuesday 20th February 2018, 7:30 pm
Maiden in the Moor + Sefiroth – Thursday 22nd February 2018, 7:30 pm
Åkervinda + Maiden in The Moor – Thursday 1st March 2018, 7:30 pm
‘A Vanished Kingdom’:
Free-entry workshops – Saturday 10th February 2018, 9.30am; Saturday 24th Feburary 2018, 2.00pm, Saturday 3rd March 2018, 10.00am
Presentation concert (plus pre-concert performances by Åkervinda + Alex Roth/Alice Zawadzki/Olesya Zdorovetskaya) – Saturday 3rd March 2018, 2:00 pm
“In this concert London Composers Forum composers will explore the many and varied aspects of the art song, with solo and ensemble vocal pieces on a wide variety of themes accompanied by a chamber ensemble of wind and strings.”
“Vocal music, which may have begun as an accessory to the dance in remote antiquity, is probably the oldest branch of the art of music. At a later time, bards and troubadours developed the art to commemorate heroic exploits and heroes’ deaths, and minstrels, with their songs of love both innocent and erotic, contributed another genre. During the course of the twentieth century, with the assistance of broadcasting and the record industry, the art of song proliferated into many styles. There are good and bad examples in all of these, but on the whole, there has been a regrettable tendency to ignore the art and craftsmanship in the process.
“The aim of this venture is to write songs for an evening’s general entertainment and to demonstrate that the art of good song-writing never died. Nine musicians will provide the accompaniment to a variety of original and colourful songs, especially written for the occasion. Come, with your friends, and enjoy the music in the ambient atmosphere of the Tea House, where food will be served until 10pm and drinks until midnight. See you there!”
Among the works performed will be David Arditti’s ‘Chamber Music’ (a song cycle setting of James Joyce, sung by tenor Ezra Williams and now orchestrated for a larger chamber ensemble) and Laurence Glazier‘s ‘Smartphone Aria’. There will also be new songs by Denis Betro, Jane de Florez, Peter Openshaw, Pamela Slater, John Holland, Liz Sharma, Janet Oates and Philip Jones. No news on who, besides Ezra, is actually performing (although I’m reasonably sure that Jane de Florez will be singing her own material.)
A preview of Lawrence’s piece – and a few examples of previous songs from various contributors – are below…
Another classical songwriter’s concert for February is here – this one’s a free admission event for anyone who’s got an early Tuesday afternoon available…
The above is part of Series 5, the latest set of lunchtime concerts from south London New Music promoters Borough New Music covering new and rarely-performed contemporary pieces. For part of this season, Borough Music have teamed up with 2021 Concerts (Mimi Doulton and fellow soprano Patricia Auchterlonie’s own concert series) for several performances focussing on the human voice, sometimes in odd combinations and juxtapositions with other instruments.
Mimi herself makes another appearance in the series, performing a series of vocal/song-pieces, one of which – Alex Gowan-Webster’s ‘Cantio Invocatione’ – is a world premiere. The rest, dating from the late 1970s to the late noughties (Judith Weir’s ‘King Harald’s Saga’, Stephen Barchan’s ‘Two Songs About Spiders’, Elliott Carter’s ‘La Musique’, Georges Aperghis’ ‘Récitations 1 & 8’ and Oliver Knussen’s ‘Four Late Poems and an Epigram of Rainer Maria Rilke’) are not.
Here are some details for the first three shows (taken from the programme and tweaked/expanded where necessary), spread out from the end of January to the middle of February:
“Xenia Rubinos can make social consciousness sensual,” says the ‘New York Times’. Her catchy yet exuberantly visceral songs meld weighty social issues with intimately personal ones and draw from a broad palette of influences ranging from Caribbean and jazz to indie rock, hip-hop and punk.
“Xenia will team up with Adam Schatz’s Civil Engineering, a high-energy, ten-member multi-dimensional big band led by the protean multi-instrumentalist Adam Schatz, “New York’s indie-rock Zelig” (‘New York Observer’) and Landlady frontman, to perform new arrangements of her songs, his songs, and composers they love, and to premiere new works written for the Ecstatic Music Festival.
“Regarding the project, Adam claims to be “chasing the spirits of Duke Ellington and Gene Wilder. I am trying to operate at a large scale that hits at the heart and can go anywhere at any time. Songs, improvisations, and adventures with a big band of impossibly talented people. This is Civil Engineering.” The band has included Alec Spiegelman, Ross Edwards, Brandon Seabrook (Seabrook Power Plant, Needle Driver), Ross Gallagher, Noah Garabedian (Big Butter And The Egg Men, Ravi Coltrane), Stephanie Richards, Curtis Hasselbring (The New Mellow Edwards, Decoupage, The Curha-chestra) and Patrick Breiner.
“The adventurous, Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet – one of the most celebrated and influential ensembles of our time – joins NYC’s acclaimed youth new music ensemble (and Kaufman in-house orchestra) Face the Music to perform new works written for Kronos’ “Fifty for the Future”, a commissioning, education and legacy project showcasing contemporary approaches to the string quartet that features new works by some of today’s foremost composers.
The two ensembles will perform separately and together: there’s no details on the Kronos setlist yet, or on the combined programme, but Face the Music will be performing Yotam Haber‘s ‘From The Book’ and Kala Ramnath‘s ‘Amrit’.
“Co-founded in 1987 by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, Bang On A Can has grown from a one-off concert band to a ceaselessly active, multi-bodied and internationally famous New Music ensemble, building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders. Set up in 1997, long before crowd-funding became the norm through Kickstarter and the like, Bang On A Can’s People’s Commissioning Fund has pooled contributions of all sizes from hundreds of friends and fans. Since its inception as a radical partnership between artists and audiences to commission works from adventurous composers, it has commissioned over fifty works of music for New York’s electric Bang on a Can All-Stars.
All concerts are performed at Merkin Concert Hall @ Kaufman Music Center, 129 W 67th Street, Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, NY 10023, USA. Dates and times below:
Xenia Rubinos & Adam Schatz’s Civil Engineering – Saturday 27th January 2018, 7:30pm – information here and here
Kronos Quartet & Face The Music – Monday 5th February 2018, 7:30pm – information here and here
Bang on a Can People’s Commissioning Fund Concert – Thursday 15th February 2018, 7:30pm – here and here
For those who might not have already followed up on the remaining six dates between March and April, I’ll stick up reminders closer to the time…
News on an intriguing long-weekender of a festival coming up next month…
“Imagine if Bach was a jazzman, Vivaldi a folk-fiddler, or Handel a minimalist… A brand-new event from the creators of the highly successful London Festival of Baroque Music (artistic director Lindsay Kemp and manager Lucy Bending, working in partnership with LSO St Luke’s) the Baroque At The Edge festival invites leading musicians ranging from classical to world, jazz and folk to take the music of the Baroque and see where it leads them. No rules, no programme notes, no lectures: all you need to know is how to listen.”
There are three virtuoso duet concerts. The first features German recorder player Tabea Debus and theorbo lutenist Alex McCartney performing Telemann’s Solo Fantasias, alongside specially commissioned new pieces from Colin Matthews (‘Meditation’), Laura Bowler (‘TV Man’) and Fumiko Miyachi (‘Air’). The second is a part-improvisational teamup of lutenist Thomas Dunford and Persian percussionist Keyvan Chemirani, crossing and blending the sounds of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European Baroque masters with similarly dazzling and spiritual Persian compositions. The third and last brings together Bjarte Eike (of raw folk/Baroque crossover ensemble Barokksolistene) and jazz pianist Jon Balke(of Magnetic North Orchestra).
Opening the festival, delightfully eclectic pianist, programmer and prime musical communicator Joanna MacGregor will deliver a concert “celebrating birds, ground basses and chaconnes” and consisting of nineteen pieces spanning four-and-a-half centuries – not only the Baroque (handsomely represented by Alessandro Poglietti, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Henry Purcell, Louis-Claude Daquin, François Couperin and Johann Pachelbel), but the Renaissance (William Byrd), the Romantic movement (Franz Liszt, Leoš Janáček), Modernism (Olivier Messiaen), minimalism (Philip Glass) and the fanning-out of contemporary classical (Harrison Birtwistle, Hossein Alizâdeh, Sofia Gubaidulina).
Warm, witty universal percussionists O Duo (Oliver Cox and Owen Gunnell) will be leading a family-friendly open-to-all percussion workshop with a baroque twist, while Paolo Pandolfo gives a solo viola da gamba recital embracing fantasies and popular dance-tunes of the sixteenth century, brushes with Bach, Telemann and the French baroque, and Paolo’s own captivating 21st-century improvisations.
Perhaps most absorbingly, vocal ensemble The Marian Consort (accompanied by lutenist Jamie Akers and solo actor/onetime ‘Casualty’ star Gerald Kyd) will deliver the London premiere of Clare Norburn’s concert-drama ‘Breaking the Rules‘, an acclaimed concert-drama exploring the last agonies of the seventeenth-century composer Carlo Gesualdo (a boundary-crossing influence on artists including Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, Werner Herzog and Frank Zappa). Having jealously murdered his first wife Donna Maria D’Avalos (along with her lover), Gesualdo poured his pain into deeply and unconventionally expressive music of torture and regret. ‘Breaking The Rules’ promises “(a) sound-track to Gesualdo’s mind on the final night of his life, as he contemplates his own mortality and the tumultuous events which have led him to this moment.”
Dates for ‘Baroque at the Edge’ (all other information is here):
Joanna MacGregor – LSO St Lukes, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England, Friday 5th January 2017, 7.30pm
Tabea Debus & Alex McCartney – St James Clerkenwell, Clerkenwell Close, Clerkenwell, London, EC1R 0EA, England, Saturday 6th January 2017, 1.00pm
Paolo Pandolfo – LSO St Lukes, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England, Saturday 6th January 2017, 4.00pm
The Marian Consort: ‘Breaking the Rules’ – LSO St Lukes, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England, Saturday 6th January 2017, 7.00pm – tickets
Thomas Dunford & Keyvan Chemirani – LSO St Lukes, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England, Saturday 6th January 2017, 9.30pm
O Duo Family Workshop – LSO St Lukes, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England, Sunday 7th January 2017, 10.30am
Bjarte Eike & Jon Balke – LSO St Lukes, 161 Old Street, St Lukes, London, EC1V 9NG, England, Sunday 7 January 2018, 12.30pm
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Much later in the month, over in a lofty Arts & Crafts Movement Anglo-Catholic church in west Kensington, the London City Quartet will be playing four string quartets: one of them an established twentieth century classic, the other three brand new works.
West Kensington Music Team presents:
London City Quartet: “Bomafescho.” St. Cuthbert’s Church (Earls Court), 50 Philbeach Gardens, Earls Court, London, SW5 9EB, England
Saturday 27th January 2018, 5.00pm – tickets & enquiries via email here or via telephone (020 7101 4479)
Programme:
Dmitri Shostakovich – String Quartet No. 1 David Bozzo – String Quartet No. 2 Brian Martínez – String Quartet No. 1 Peter Fender – String Quartet No. 1 (Thredony Quartet) Op. 30
There hasn’t been much more that I could dig up about this, either from the slightly bewildering WKMT homepage or elsewhere; but as appetite-sharpeners here’s a recording of David Bozzo’s previous string quartet (as played by the Billroth Quartet), a Martinez piano prelude, and a rendition of the Shostakovich by the Fitzwilliam Quartet. (Peter Fender, modestly, seems to restrict his own video output to examples of his conducting and training rather than his compositions.)
As a matter of course, London-based Anglo-Norwegian cello trio Tre Voci (consisting of Torun Saeter Stavseng, Gregor Riddell and Colin Alexander) sit on a triple cusp. Their work focusses on Early music, contemporary compositions (they’ve premiered work by composers including Mica Levi, Alex Nikiporenko, Bryn Harrison, Kit Downes, Peter Wiegold, Edwin Hillier and Sergei Zagny) and improvisations. Much of this early December concert (played twice in a single day, under the aegis of the Nonclassical organization) sees them explore the third of these directions, creating “meditative” new surround-sound music in combination with outstanding Iranian hand-drummer Mohammad Reza Mortazavi. Laid out in the ICA’s performance space, it will be part gig, part walk-through three-dimensional installation, with further synaesthesic dimensions added by the live visuals from Norwegian artist Henrik Koppen.
For part of the concert’s second half, the trio will play unspecified new compositions of their own as well as teaming up with Norwegian soprano Silje Aker Johnsen to premier a new work by David Stephen Grant. In a recent interview on the Nonclassical blog, Colin Alexander states that the Grant piece will “cover the listeners in thick, interwoven layers of sound… David writes rich, warm and engulfing electro-acoustic music that will fill the space at ICA with shifting harmonies and blurred timbres. My first experience of his writing was through a duo for violin and cello with electronics that I performed with Mira Benjamin in Oslo and London. Although simple and relatively short it was incredibly effective through its nuanced beauty and delicately judged movement.”
Nonclassical & Tre Voci Cello Ensemble present:
Tre Voci: Orbits Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, Westminster, London, SW1Y 5AH England, United Kingdom
Sunday 3rd December 2017, 4.00pm & 8.00pm – information here and here
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There was a time when Keith Burstein could barely stay out of trouble. As a conductor and commissioner of New Music, he was a rising pillar of British contemporary classical music during his twenties. However, his discovery of his own composing voice – staunchly tonal, in fervent reaction to the austere high-modernist abstractions of the times – drew him into a series of vicious joustings and spats in the early ‘90s, played out first within the musical community, then in the press, in the concert hall and ultimately in the libel courts. He fought hard. The establishment he’d jilted and criticised fought equally hard. There’s not been much forgiveness on either side.
Ten years later, his opera ‘Manifest Destiny’ (which took a broad-brush metaphysical approach to the War on Terror) was performed in Edinburgh in the wake of the London suicide bombings of 2005. Further spats followed over alleged glorification of terrorism. There was another court case, and a bankruptcy. As before, Keith would argue (and continues to argue) that he was fighting not just for his own right to musical self-expression and political challenges, but for everyone else’s. Subsequent adventures have been quieter (and his rebellions subtler), but even as he approaches his sixtieth year he’s never entirely lost that self-appointed role as vehement high-culture renegade.
With all that said, the ultimate Burstein concerns and preoccupations seem more suited to metaphysical and spiritual realms rather than the political and strategic trappings of the battles he’s fought, and their scale and fervour have tended to overshadow the music: the water-pageant melancholy of ‘Requiem for the Young’, the entanglement of manners and compressed frenzy in his ‘Dance of Love/Dance of Death’ string quartet; the foreboding elegance of his choral Holocaust meditation ‘The Year’s Midnight’ and the lucid romantic panorama of his ‘Elixir’ symphony. When writing to a grander scale, he composes work that in some respects resembles the Whitehall of his beloved London – looming and aspirational; fascinated by the power of architecture and history, yet at the same open to and ownable by passers-by; his structures echoing the antique yet repurposing them to modern ends, and being buffeted and reshaped by contemporary impacts; an meticulous admixture of historicism and retrofitting.
This month’s lunchtime recital, however, provides the opportunity to appreciate his music on a smaller magnitude, at a remove from grander clutter of conflicts and history. Packing various shorter Burstein works for piano, violin and cello into its forty-five minutes, it includes assorted piano preludes and the final movement of Keith’s recent ‘Wiosna’ cello sonata (one of several recent works in which he retraces his family history back through his parents’ work as violinists with the Brighton Philharmonic and Halle Orchestra to their Eastern European roots and Russian/Lithuanian connections). Keith (on piano) is joined by notable solo cellist Corinne Morris – whose ‘Macedonian Sessions’ reached number 2 in the classical charts this year – and by violinist/composer Roland Roberts (Solaris Quartet, City of Oxford Orchestra, Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra and many more). Both Corinne and Roland have worked with Keith before; the former premiering ‘Wiosna’… and the latter co-premiering the piano/violin duet Keith composed this year in honour of his late mother Barbara.
Lunchtime Recital of the Works of Keith Burstein (with Keith Burstein, Corinne Morris, Roland Roberts) 1901 Club, 7 Exton Street, Waterloo, London, SE1 8UE, England
Monday 11th December 2017, 12.00pm – information here and here
Every Sunday on Oxford Street a bland corporate doorway disgorges a full Salvation Army wind band which, rain or shine, tramps up and down past the shoppers, playing hymns on busy corners or (at Christmastime) adding a numinous aural glow to the grandeur of Selfridges storefront. Should you choose to sneak inside the same door, you’ll find yourself in Regent Hall, a five-hundred-and-fifty seat venue, once a Victorian rollerskating rink but subsequently transformed by Sally Army founder William Booth into a worship hall. It’s one of central London’s hidden-away concert glories, much like the splendid Bolivar Hall tucked away at the Venezuelan Embassy ten minutes northwards (which you’re only likely to have heard of if invited to a Latin American event).
I’ve only recently discovered that Regent Hall hosts the annual London New Wind Festival, directed by oboeist and composer Catherine Pluygers, and that the 2017 concert takes place next Friday. The evening sports a double-quintet ensemble of Simon Desorgher and Gavin Morrison (flutes), Judy Proctor and Catherine Pluygers (oboes), Phil Edwards and Ian Mitchell (clarinets), Henryk Sienkiewicz and Gillian Jones (horns), Glyn Williams and Anna Feild (bassoons) plus pianist Robert Coleridge and conductor David Sutton-Anderson; promising “a concert in our usual style… a varied and memorable programme of new music with focus on wind symphony orchestras, brass ensembles, new music by women composers and improvisation.”
The concert notes add “as is our trademark, we are presenting an exciting concert of new pieces especially written for double wind quintet (ten wind players) as well as piano and electronics, composed in a huge variety of styles ranging from the edgy ‘Rape Of The Moone’ by Elisabeth Lutyens (for eight wind instruments), and the mobile ‘Shadow Play’ (for flute and clarinet) by George Nicholson, to the atmospheric ‘Windchanges’ (for ten wind instruments) by Michael Christie and the dynamic ’Metropolis’ (for all eleven players and electronics) by Catherine Pluygers.”
Full programme:
George Nicholson – Shadow Play for Flute and Clarinet
Giorgio Coslovich – A Winter’s Tale (world premiere)
Michiko Shimanuki – Ordinary Things in My Garden (world premiere)
David Sutton-Anderson – Nachtritt
Elisabeth Lutyens – Rape of the Moone (Op.90)
Catherine Pluygers – Metropolis
Michael Christie – Windchanges
Paul Patterson – Phoenix Sonata (2nd movement) for oboe and piano
London New Wind Festival, The Hinrichsen Foundation, Holst Foundation & the Performing Rights Society present:
The 20th London New Wind Festival Regent Hall, Salvation Army, 275 Oxford Street, London, W1C 2DJ, England
Friday 17th November 2017, 7.30pm – information
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With his roots and his heart in Broadway (where he debuted as a musical director at the tender age of nineteen), recognition which includes four Emmy Awards, and skills that span piano, composing, lyric-writing, conducting, opera translation and producing, Glen Roven is pretty much the complete musician.
This is particularly true if you start by looking at things through the rosy lens of adult contemporary music. Glen’s a globetrotting polymath of those spangled and sometimes self-regarding spheres within which Presidential inaugurations and all-star galas, light and heavy concert music blend with tuxedo-donning pop stars, power brokers and opera premieres. His adventures include writing a musical with Armistead Maupin, conducting high-profile live Steven Spielberg extravaganzas and Leonard Bernstein tributes, and leading orchestras for (among others) Sinatra, Domingo, Sammy Davis Jr and Kermit the Frog.
Yet for all of the pops-gala glitz that can surround Glen, he’s also deeply embedded in the formal classical world, translating Mahler, Schubert and Mozart and generating prolific amounts of his own original work – notably, thirty-five different song cycles which have worked their way into repertoire around the world). In part, he’s the deliverer of a kind of sumptuous, sugarplum American classical – deceptively complex and with a shrewd mind brought to bear on its audience, bridging the inclusive easy-listening dynamics of pop-orchestral and classical fusion with the edgier harmonic depth of unsublimated modern music. He’s arguably best known these days for his adaptations of classic children’s narratives ‘The Runaway Bunny’ and ‘Goodnight Moon’, both of which are latterday successors to the likes of Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and Don Gillis’ ‘The Man Who Invented Music’ (and, all right, Kleinsinger and Tripp’s ‘Tubby the Tuba’) – accessible and dramatic music full of colours, moods and ready universal emotion: functioning both as stepping stones into a wider classical world and as witty, heartfelt works in their own right. On a harder note, his taut and emotional contributions to ‘The AIDS Quilt Songbook’ project suggest a man who’s anything but lost in showbiz.
If you fancy an up-close London evening in which Glen himself pares his work down to its greatest simplicity and directness – just his own piano plus three leading singers from classical and musical theatre – you’ve got a chance to attend one. At Waterloo’s 1901 Arts Club, Glen will be joined by Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch (soon to be seen in the world premiere of Nico Muhly’s ‘Marnie’ at English National Opera), and international mezzo sopranos Lucy Schaufer and Kim Criswell for various UK premiere performances, including a world premiere.
Jonathan Blalock & Tintagel Music present:
Kim Criswell, Daniel Okulitch and Lucy Schaufer sing The Music Of Glen Roven 1901 Club, 7 Exton Street, Waterloo, London, SE1 8UE, England
Wednesday 22nd November 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
Programme:
Two Songs by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Love Is Not Love, An Ancient Gesture) (performed by Lucy Schaufer) (UK premiere)
Saraband from ‘Symphony No.2’ (performed by Glen Roven) (world premiere)
Songs from the Underground (performed by Daniel Okulitch) (UK premiere)
The Hillary Speeches (performed by Kim Criswell) (UK premiere)
Goodnight Moon (performed by Daniel Okulitch) (UK premiere)
For examples I’ll leave you with performances of ‘Goodnight Moon’ in its full orchestral/soprano version, a Roven Yeats setting and the AIDS Quilt piece ‘Retro’ (the latter two sung by Daniel Okulitch) plus a hour-long interview with Glen himself, which ought to throw his work into a more detailed light as well as displaying his own confident, breezy pragmatism about his method and motives (pragmatic enough to make most of my critical hopscotching above a little redundant).
From early November to early December, City of London Sinfonia are putting on a “trilogy” of concerts exploring “how music and sound can link us to spiritual experiences”, featuring various contemporary classical pieces; many of which are drawn from the fields of Eastern European holy minimalism, or from musical strands involving contemporary takes on spiritual or environmental matters. At least two of the concerts feature added meditational or projected-image aspects; which might sound gimmicky, but it can’t be denied that this particular music lends itself to psychedelic or synaesthesic experiences.
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Modern Mystics: ‘The Fruit of Silence’ Southwark Cathedral, London Bridge, Southwark, London, SE1 9DA, England
Thursday 9th November 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
In the first concert, the Sinfonia are joined by violinist/evening director Alexandra Wood, conductor Michael Collins and the Epiphoni Consort, promising “music that draws you in with its purity, clarity and tranquillity… the music of Pärt, Vasks and Tabakova evoke the transcendental, with chant-like washes of colour and spellbinding soundscapes.” The concert also features projected visuals by Jack James Projections.
Programme:
Pēteris Vasks – The Fruit Of Silence Arvo Pärt – Seven Magnificat Antiphons
Arvo Pärt – Summa
Arvo Pärt – Fratres
Arvo Pärt – Magnificat Dobrinka Tabakova – Organum Light
Arvo Pärt – Tabula Rasa
This concert also features a brief pre-concert “mindful meditation” event in the cathedral’s retrochoir at 7.00pm, guided by CLS violinist and alternative healer Ann Morphee, with a plan to “explore the deeply contemplative second movement of Part’s ‘Tabula Rasa’, and enhance our self-awareness and openness ahead of the performance by employing mindfulness techniques… the art of focusing on the present moment. It is a fundamental strategy for dealing with stress, helping us to relax and be uninfluenced by habitual behaviour that we experience in our day-to-day activities”. No previous experience is required, but there are only fifty places available (for event ticketholders only).
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Modern Mystics: ‘The Book of Hours’ Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PQ, England
Wednesday 22nd November 2017, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
The second concert, conducted by Jessica Cottis, features “new music which evokes the sounds of ancient worlds… Music is timeless – it links the modern-day to forgotten eras, stretches seconds into minutes and makes hours dissolve in a moment. Combining live orchestra, recordings and lighting, the second concert in City of London Sinfonia’s Modern Mystics Sonic Trilogy conjures up the past through music, light and amplification.” Again, Jack James provides the projections and visuals.
Again, there’s a strongly ecclesiastical aspect to this one, with the Anderson piece being a modern reexamination of ancient Christian monk rituals, the Harvey originating from an IRCAM taped work with Tibetan temple bell, and the Causton being a reworking of part of a de Machuat mass (with its two instrumental groups separated as far from each other as the venue will allow). While not directly religious in its roots, the Skempton is a musical evaluation of cultural and temporal loss centred around the decay and demolition of an old mill, and the gap left by its absence.
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Modern Mystics: ‘The Protecting Veil’ St John’s Smith Square, Smith Square, Westminster, London, SW1P 3HA, England
Saturday 2nd December 2017, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Alexandra Wood returns as orchestra leader and event director for the third and final concert (which is also part of the Southbank Centre’s ‘Belief and Beyond Belief‘ series). This will be a presentation of John Tavener‘s ‘The Protecting Veil’ with cellist Matthew Barley sharing the load as both featured soloist and presenter. The event’s described as “an ecstatic vision of devotion revealed by cello and orchestra… ‘The Protecting Veil’ is music which blurs the line between humanity and divinity – a glimpse into otherworldliness through the Eastern Orthodox rituals celebrated around Mary, Mother of God. We invite you on a journey to the centre of the music through living programme notes – and get close enough to touch as we transform St John’s Smith Square with intimate seating.”
Programme:
John Tavener/Matthew Barley – Living programme notes on ‘The Protecting Veil’
John Tavener – The Protecting Veil
For the launch of their new season, Kammer Klang team up with the London Sinfonietta for a set of chamber pieces performed by Sinfonietta solo instrumentalists or as playback items, all of which dovetail into the Sinfonietta’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
Kammer Klang & London Sinfonietta present:
Kammer Klang: Tim Gill + Alistair Mackie (playing Javier Álvarez/Jonathan Harvey/Lauren Marshall) + Trevor Wishart Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Wednesday 8th November 2017, 7.30pm – information here, here and here
Cellist Tim Gill and trumpeter Alistair Mackie (assisted by sound design setups from Sound Intermedia) will be applying their talents to electro-acoustic pieces. One, by the late Jonathan Harvey, sees a solo trumpet transformed into a garrulous ensemble. Another, by the Mexican-Korean-influenced Javier Álvarez is a fabulously dramatic ritual, teeming and menacing, for string sounds and and-bowed-gong ritual inspired by a pairing of two short silent films from the 1920s (a Man Ray image sequence, preceded by horribly compelling footage of a feeding snake). There’ll also be a stereo diffusion playback of Trevor Wishart’s software-driven studio piece ‘Globalalia’, a rapid-fire collage of vocal samples which he describes as “a universal dance of human speech as revealed in twenty tales from everywhere, spoken in tongues”.
In addition, Tim will be performing the evening’s usual ‘Fresh Klang’ item – in this case, a cello-and-electronics piece by Lauren Marshall, principal composer with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Online examples of Lauren’s work are still quite rare, but I’ve included a couple of her Soundcloud clips in the roundup below: ‘Hi-Seas’, her violin/string ensemble/electronics mediation on disassociative loneliness, and her luxuriant expanded-orchestra fantasia ‘Suspended Between Earth And Air’ (hailed in ‘Seen And Heard‘, after its premiere back in January, as “a miracle of inspiration (with) stupendous impact”). Both display the work of a young composer with a remarkable flair for slow reveal and the implementation of artful drones with a dreamy Romantic melodicism. Her assured talents translate down well from full Wagnerian orchestras to smaller ensembles, so the same should hold true of this new duet between cellist and software.
Programme:
Fresh Klang: Lauren Marshall – Chang’e flies to the moon (for cello and electronics) – performed by Tim Gill
Jonathan Harvey – Other Presences (for trumpet & electronics) – performed by Alistair Mackie with Sound Intermedia electronics
Jonathan Harvey – Ricercare una Melodia (for trumpet & electronics) – performed by Alistair Mackie with Sound Intermedia electronics
Javier Álvarez – Le repas du serpent & Retour à la raison (for cello & electronics) – performed by Tim Gill with Sound Intermedia electronics)
Trevor Wishart – Globalalia (stereo diffusion)
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For those of you interested in the workings and applications of the graphic score, there’s an event a couple of days after Kammer Klang which delves into the world of this intriguing avant-garde tool, as part of the Royal Academy’s Jasper Johns exhibition…
Club Inégales & EFG London Jazz Festival presents:
‘Visualising Music: The Art of the Graphic Score’
The Reynolds Room @ Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London, W1J 0BD, England
Friday 10th November 2017, 6.30pm – information here and here
“In response to the dynamic that brought Jasper Johns and John Cage together in the 60s, musicians from Club Inégales combine with trumpeter/composer Kim Macari (leader of Family Band, founder of the Apollo Jazz Network and the Orpheus Project) and saxophonist/composer Raymond MacDonald (Professor of Music Psychology and Improvisation at Edinburgh University, co-founder of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and veteran of over sixty album releases), for a performance and discussion exploring the world of graphic scores, improvisation and structure.
“A ground-breaking composer and associate of Jasper Johns, John Cage was a keen graphic score composer, using visual symbols beyond traditional music notation to guide musicians in the performance of his work. Since then, composers and artists have played with pictures to create extraordinary visual scores to redefine the possibilities within composition, merging art and sound.
“In this exclusive event, Kim Macari will then be joined by founder of Club Inégales Peter Wiegold and Professor Raymond MacDonald, chair of Music Psychology and Improvisation at The University of Edinburgh, to explore the art of the graphic score.”
Three of the imminent, interesting classical gigs in London this coming month… some contemporary solo piano in Shoreditch, some disparate contemporary chamber music taking over an Islington theatre, and a celebration of women composers by a female music collective in Stoke Newington…
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SOLO presents:
SOLO 04: Eliza McCarthy Shoreditch Treehouse, 34 Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PB, England
Tuesday 7th November 2017, 7.00pm – information
“SOLO is back and this time we’re heading to a cosy loft right in the heart of Shoreditch for an intimate recital from acclaimed pianist Eliza McCarthy! Eliza specialises in contemporary music and has worked with a whole bunch of composers from John Adams to Tansy Davies and Andrew Hamilton to Mica Levi. Expect a veritable smorgasbord – contemporary pieces by John Adams, John Luther Adams, Mica Levi and more, a side order of J.S. Bach, and the world première of ‘Curved Form (No. 4)’ by Alex Groves.”
Here’s Eliza playing some Levi at Kammer Klang a while back…
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At the moment, there’s no more info on which Bach, Levi and Adams(es) pieces Eliza will be playing: but you might like to know that the next in Alex’s sequence of ‘Curved Form’ pieces – ‘Curved Form (No. 5)’ – will be played the following week at the Rosemary Branch’s informal Chamber Sundays evening, curated by mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton, at which you’ll also hear compositions by Adam Gorb and Jonathan Dove.
Chamber Sundays: Rosie Middleton & Friends The Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Road, De Beauvoir Town, London, N1 3DT, England
Sunday 12th November 2017, 7.00pm – information
Sorry – I’ve not got much more information on that either, other than what’s above; but here are some sample pieces from Adam, Alex and Jonathan…
“Scordatura Women’s Music Collective is a group of musicians who want to extend the established repertoire by performing and championing music written by women. With interests ranging from Baroque Historical Performance to contemporary composition to world music, members of the collective will be performing from a huge, varied and beautiful body of music.
“On this occasion, the group are performing an evening of duos for cello, clarinet and viola composed by some of the most exciting women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
Encouraging that this is going on: encouraging, too, that I managed to track down performances of seven of those nine pieces in a further attempt to persuade you to go along.
Coverage of the complex, perverse and joyful musical work of the sadly incapacitated Tim Smith – whether inside or outside his mothership Cardiacs band – frequently figures in here. It’s good to bring you all more about his continued crossover from cult status to something wider: this time, with news of a conservatory jazz gig in Amsterdam and of the continued afterlife of Spratleys Japs.
Broedplaats Lely & Steim present:
Connector V Steim, Schipluidenlaan 12-3E, 1062HE Amsterdam, Netherlands
Thursday 2nd November 2017, 8.00pm – information
“Composers are not necessarily dead. They also do not necessarily write symphonies in D flat minor in a 4/4 time signature.
“Tim Smith, frontman of the British band called Cardiacs, is a great composer who wrote lots of music permeated with energy, humour, beauty, Britishness. By people who only partly open their ears (or their minds for that matter), his music has been defined as being “chaotic”. The opposite is true, however: it is strongly organised music and all one needs to be able to do is count past four (and not forget about prime numbers). This challenging mix of punk, prog rock, orchestral and live electronic music (also known as “pronk”) will be performed by BarmyFiveseveN, a “small big band” ensemble of around fifteen players from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, armed with live electronic extensions.”
Connector V is part of a monthly series at Steim: regular readers should recognise this particular one as a follow-up to the Smith-covering set by Alex Brajkovic Ensemble at Amsterdam’s Jazz Ensemble Festival back in April, and it does in fact feature most or all of the same players, put together by rebel prog professor Jos Zwaanenburg. No-one seems to have recorded/posted evidence from the last time, so I can’t show you how it went – but as before, I can give you some very loose indications as to how this concert might might turn out by referring you to English Rose Orchestrations’ string quartet version of one of the featured pieces, The Duck And Roger The Horse.
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The following month, Spratleys Japs consolidate the success of their Brighton and London reunion shows over the last couple of years by setting out on a bigger, broader English tour taking in Yorkshire and the West as well as the south east, with a mass of current/former Cardiacs and friends coalescing as support around the tour dates.
Read more about SJ here: in brief, though, they’re a short-lived and swampy alternate-universe pop project (part alien folk maunderings, part glam-punk punch and part spindly antiprog) which Tim put together in the mid-’90s with then-girlfriend/muse Jo Spratley. Now revived by Jo and a collection of Brighton art rockers, they’ve got a second wind and have been rattling through fresh gigs partially in tribute to Tim and partially because the enthralling, infuriating puzzle-box songs have a peculiar life of their own.
As regards the backup, looming raconteur Stephen Evens brings his scowling, sardonic British pop along to the London, Brighton and Bristol shows (possibly with full band in tow for all of them). In a similar vein, Yorkshire dark-melodrama rockers The Scaramanga Six pile in at the Huddersfield date, while the Brighton show also sports vigorous dream poppers Hurtling and noisy art-rock goons Ham Legion (the latter performing their Syd Barrett tribute as “Vegetable Men” (plus another acoustic set from Kavus Torabi, squeezing in time in between fronting Gong, Knifeworld and his radio broadcasts). At Bristol there’s another onetime Cardiacs guitarist, Jon Poole, possibly bringing both solo stuff and one-man versions of his clever-pop work with The Dowling Poole; plus ZOFFF (the reverberant south coast kosmische/deep-psych band featuring Crayola Lectern‘s Chris Anderson and yet another ex-Cardiac six-stringer, Bic Hayes).
As with most Cardiacs-related events, these give you a cross-section of a under-celebrated ongoing British sub-scene; stretching from surprisingly accessible, sharply written latter-day take on Britpop right through to mantric pedal noise and squirts of lysergic space-cadet juice. Here’s a selection of sundries from all concerned:
Full dates:
The Parish, 28 Kirksgate, Huddersfield, Yorkshire, HD1 1QQ, England, Thursday 14th December 2017, 7.30pm(with The Scaramanga Six) – information here and here
Exchange, 72-73 Old Market, Bristol, Avon, BS2 0EJ, England, Friday 15th December 2017, 7.30pm(with Jon Poole + ZOFFF + Stephen Evens) – information here and here
The Green Door Store, 2-4 Trafalgar Arches, Lower Goods Yard, Brighton Train Station, Brighton BN1 4FQ, England, Saturday 16th December 2017, 6.00pm(with Kavus Torabi + Stephen Evens (full band) + Hurtling + Ham Legion As Vegetable Men) – information here and here
The Windmill, 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton, London, SW2 5BZ, England, Sunday 17th December 2017 (with Stephen Evens + others tbc) – information t.b.c.
UPDATE, 18th October – apparently we can also expect a couple of imminent fundraising Cardiacs cover versions from Spratleys Japs and Stephen Evens (Odd Even and Two Bites of Cherry), plus other surprises they’re keeping a little tightlipped about for the moment.
Meanwhile, Cornish psychedelic folkie Emily Jones (another Spratleys friend from previous gigs) has been added to the Brighton concert, which now also features a Torabi/Steve Davis DJ set. Support for the Brixton Windmill show in London is going to be thrashy prog-pop stuntmeisters The Display Team and rapidly rising Windmill favourites Black Midi. Below are a couple of moments from Emily and the ‘Team. (There’s not much more I can give you about Black MIDI. They’re so new that the paint’s hardly dry on them, and their Soundcloud page is still empty; but I did manage to establish that they’re an experimental/instrumental rock five-piece of teenage Croydonians and that they’re “purveyors of the darkest dreamscapes”…)
There’s a couple of classical concerts at the end of the month: not necessarily groundbreaking in what they play (although there is one premiere involved) but interesting in how they arrange their programme or in how they perform it.
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Conway Hall Ethical Society presents:
Music-in-Motion Ensemble & Gildas Quartet, directed by John Landor Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Bloomsbury, London, WC1R 4RL, London
Saturday 28th October 2017, 3.30 pm & 7.30pm; Tuesday 31 October 2017, 7.30pm – information
“Following his powerful staging of Janáček’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ with the Gildas Quartet at Conway Hall last May, John Landor returns with the quartet and the newly-formed Music-in-Motion Ensemble of thirteen string players to present an eclectic programme of music from Purcell to Pärt.
“Immersive, visual and theatrical, Music-in-Motion brings a bold new aesthetic approach to the traditional classical concert. Turning the whole auditorium into a “theatre of music”, the musicians become embodied channels of the musical drama, dissolving boundaries between performers and audience. You are welcome to sit, stand, or even lie down pretty much anywhere during the performance, so you can bring your own cushion or mat, or use ours. It’s a social event too! At the evening concerts, you can bring in drinks from the bar, and everyone is invited to the ‘after-party’ where audience and performers can mingle and discuss the performance, or indeed anything else!”
What this means in practise is the exploding of the orchestral positioning and of orchestral uniformity – while retaining the hidden discipline of the orchestral units, the musicians wander out on their own across the performance space and through the audience as individuals rather than remaining en bloc, with each performer free (and encouraged) to act out the emotionality of the music. The set’s a selection of well-known repertoire war horses: the presentation and implications are less familiar.
Programme:
Johann Sebastian Bach – Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G BWV1048
Antonio Vivaldi – Sinfonia al Santo Sepolcro in B minor RV169
Arvo Pärt – Fratres
Leoš Janáček – String Quartet No. 1 ‘Kreutzer Sonata’
Henry Purcell – Chacony in G minor
Edward Elgar – Introduction and Allegro Op. 47
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The Ligeti Quartet present “Remembering the Future: Tradition and the Contemporary String Quartet” IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 28th October 2017, 7:30pm – information
Since their formation in 2010, The Ligeti Quartet (violinists Mandhira de Saram and Patrick Dawkins, viola player Richard Jones and cellist Val Welbanks) have commissioned multiple new works and collaborated with artists from all types of musical backgrounds including Anna Meredith, Elliot Galvin, Kerry Andrew (Juice Vocal Ensemble, You Are Wolf), Laura Jurd, Meilyr Jones, Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy), Seb Rochford (Polar Bear), Shabaka Hutchings (Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming), Shed 7 and Submotion Orchestra. They are currently working on a long-term project with Ernst von Siemens prize-winning composer Christian Mason to create a series of ‘Songbooks’ for string quartet, based on overtone singing traditions from around the world.
For this performance, the Ligeti Quartet are performing traditional (20th century) and contemporary pieces. These include two Bach related works (a Sofia Gubaidulina tribute and a Birtwistle rearrangement of fugues, , a revival of the debut composition by http://www.plusminusensemble.com Plus-Minus Ensemble co-leader/Cut and Splice curator Joanna Baillie (originally written for Apartment House, and performed here in its 2006 string quartet version) and a brand new piece by former Unthanks member/ Streetwise Opera composer-in-residence/Timeline Songs director Stef Conner (whose body of work as a composer has revealed her as a walker and crosser of fine lines between classical, folk, jazz and antiquity).
Programme:
Johann Sebastian Bach (arr. Harrison Birtwistle) – Three Fugues from the Art of Fugue
Anton Webern – String Quartet, Op. 28 Joanna Baillie – Five Famous Adagios (2006 string quartet version) Stef Conner – (LQ Commission, title tbc) (premiere)
Igor Stravinsky – Concertino for String Quartet Sofia Gubaidulina – Reflections on a Theme B-A-C-H Georg Friedrich Haas – String Quartet No. 2
A couple of quick referred notifications of a pair of upcoming gigs on the classical/experimental cusp – just the blurb…
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Club Inégales presents:
Howard Skempton at 70
Hall Two @ Kings Place, 90 York Way, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AG, England
Friday 13th October 2017, 10.00pm – information here and here
“Club Inégales’s live club nights in Euston create the unexpected chemistry that enables the special to happen as brings in the best in new and spontaneous performance. Its house ensemble Notes Inégales was created by two innovators in British music (Peter Wiegold and David Purser) and features some of the finest players in the country, dedicated to improvisation as well as other contemporary repertoire. Peter has been a pioneer of bringing together composition and improvisation, working directly with musicians in the creation of new work.
“Vocalist, accordionist and composer Howard Skempton has made two delightful visits to Club Inégales, performing his solo accordion pieces and singing and playing with the ensemble. In this special concert at Kings Place, Howard will be joining Notes Inégales to improvise and perform new arrangements of pieces including ‘In Cuba They Play With Maracas’, ‘Chorale Inégales’, Show Me The Limelight’, ‘Trapeze’ and a seventieth birthday tribute to American composer Christian Wolff, entitled ‘Forget the Minuet’.”
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rarescale presents:
New Baroque (with Carla Rees & Michael Oliva) IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 14th October 2017, 8.00pm – information here and here
“The first in a series of concerts combining new and old repertoire for baroque flute, ‘New Baroque’ explores how a historical instrument can be used in modern times through a series of collaborations with imaginative contemporary creators. In this eclectic programme, hear new works for baroque flute solo and with electronics by a range of living composers interspersed with music from the baroque era.
“The performers are rarescale regulars Carla Rees and Michael Oliva. A British-based low flutes player and arranger, Carla is the artistic director of rarescale and runs low-flutes publishing company Tetractys, working frequently in collaboration with composers to develop new repertoire and techniques. Originally trained as a biochemist, Michael is rarescale’s composer-in-residence: an electronic musician, with a fondness for woodwind he lectures in and teaches electroacoustic music and music technology at the Royal College of Music and Imperial College. In addition, he runs and premieres multimedia opera work with madestrange opera, a company dedicated to producing new forms of the genre for modern audiences. Recent works include a requiem commissioned by the choir Mosaic (2010) and a new full length opera, ‘Singularity’ (2015).”
The programme is still to be confirmed, but here’s a double taste of what’s likely to be involved:
Several longstanding Misfit City experimental favourites (all veterans of the liminal cross-encroachments between British post-rock, noise and electronic explorations during the 1990s) feature in a mid-month triple bill of shifting noise, words and melodies down at IKLECTIK.
Champion Version presents:
Edition 1: Rothko + Yellow6 + Darkroom IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 12th October 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
Though they’ve passed through a shifting variety of lineups and different instrumentation, Rothko are based around a single constant: Mark Beazley’s resonant post-industrial bass guitar, which speaks stern granite-y notes and impressionistic chthonic drones and blurs, sketching and deepen evocatic musical landscapes from unyielding post-punk city visions to soft-edged post-rock hillscapes.
On this occasion they’re appearing in an expanded version of the beautifully bleak words-and-shades trio last mentioned in ‘Misfit City’ just under a year ago (in which Mark was joined by recitateur Johnny Brown from Band of Holy Joy, and by Inga Tillere on projected visuals). In place for tonight’s show is a fourth member – Mark’s Low Bias colleague Graham Dowdall (a.k.a. Gagarin), whose synth wizardry’s brought him into collaboration with Pere Ubu, Suns of Arqa, Roshi and no less than two former Velvet Undergroundeers (Nico and John Cale).
Intermittent and elusive, yet steadily prolific, Jon Attwood’s solo guitar project Yellow6 has links with the undersung east London post-rock scene of the 1990s (which also spawned A.R. Kane, Disco Inferno, Moonshake and Bark Psychosis (BP’s drummer Mark Hartnett would later put in a Yellow6 stint). Moving away from his initial goth and anarcho-punk roots (tempered with soul), Jon was drawn into the world of minimalism, repetition and reverbed/distorted drone loops. Shaped equally by Jon’s natural humility and his “obsessive need to create” toward an artistic peak he’s not yet reached, Yellow6 has produced over fifty releases with results variously described as “gentle shape-shifting misery” and “beautiful, shimmering and blissful”.
With roots in Cambridge science culture, propulsive and unorthodox ambient duo Darkroom initially found their feet in the fertile 1990s ferment surrounding art-poppers No-Man (initially sporting the latter’s singer Tim Bowness as a member, and providing that particular scene’s experimental edge alongside Steven Wilson’s electrodrones as Bass Communion). Since then, like a wide-orbiting comet, synthworker Os and guitarist Michael Bearpark have forged their own idiosyncratic path in and out of various drone, loop, texture and improv clusters, as well as becoming in-house soundtrackers for brain investigations at the Hub. Moving on from their earlier minglings of boiling starstuff, ambient techno and gasping tidal experimental textures, their more recent music is moody, beating improvised electronica increasingly shaped by Mike and Os’ rediscovery of attenuated blues tones, troubled elongated Neil Young guitar churns and dark bass clarinet voicings. For more assorted ‘Misfit City’ froth and musings on Darkroom, click here. Less celebrated than their gigmates, they’ll be opening the show. They could just as well be closing it.
This concert has been set up by boutique vinyl art-music label Champion Version, who’ll have one of their limited-edition vinyl EP featuring all three acts available on the night.
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Towards the end of the month, there’s an intriguing reconnection between late twentieth-century New York and the Indonesian form which inspired so much of it…
Europalia Arts Festival Indonesia presents:
Iwan Gunawan & Stefan Lakatos’ ‘Moondog For Gamelan’ + Steve Lawson/Corey Mwamba LSO St Luke’s, 161 Old Street, St Luke’s, London, EC1V 9NG, England
Saturday 28th October 2017, 7.30pm – information
“Few musicians are the source of as much intrigue as Moondog. A blind man from Kansas transplanted to New York City, he dressed as a Viking and chose to live on the streets. His compositions reflect his experiences of hearing his way through the city – motifs borrowed from Jazz, Classical and Native American music unwind over the constant beating of a tom-tom drum, like the thumping of a subway train. Occasionally field recordings of traffic noise or crying babies sneak in, as if leaking through an open window. It’s the sound of a city, the sound of a wealth disparate parts coming together to create a complex whole – a kind of urban gamelan.
“For this concert, Moondog’s output is literally reimagined as gamelan by Iwan Gunawan (a reknowned contemporary Javanese gamelan composer known for combining the tradition with the use of electronics and computers) and Moondog’s friend and pupil Stefan Lakatos (who performs using a homemade percussion instrument given to him by the composer himself). Featuring instruments built especially for the occasion, this performance takes gamelan out of its traditional context, taking on Moondog’s experimental yet optimistic compositions. Almost minimalist in its construction – indeed, Moondog alleged that Phillip Glass once called him the “father of minimalism” – the influential outsider musician’s melodies resonate amid the controlled chaos of gamelan.”
In support, there’s a duo performance by another ‘Misfit City’ favourite – bass guitar looper Steve Lawson and experimental vibraphonist Corey Mwamba. Collaborators for at least a decade, they’re a pair of accessible yet stubborn musicians creating their own long-distance version of village music on the outskirts of the music business. Recorded/filmed evidence of what they do is surprisingly thin on the ground (I can’t find any) so you’ll have to go on word-of-mouth info about their past gigs. Expect some aspects taken from jazz and fed through sundry loops, delays and perky processors, but don’t expect them to be confined by that – their musical minds stretch from contemporary classical and process music to goofy tunes, and their textural tastes from lowdown murmur to ear-piercing noise. A big bucket to dip into.
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While we’re still on the topic of New York minimalism and Philip Glass, look out next month for what sounds like it’ll be an enthralling conjunction of Big Apple pulse and Caribbean tonal warmth…
‘Steel Pan Fusion Plays Philip Glass’ The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Thursday 23rd November 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
“One of the most influential and important composers of the twentieth century, Philip Glass is a pioneer of minimalist music alongside fellow luminaries Steve Reich and Terry Riley. With a body of work that stretches beyond contemporary classical music into film scores, operas and more, the source material is rich for reinterpretation. We have commissioned London based ensemble Steel Pan Fusion to perform a selection of works from Glass’ extensive repertoire, from his peerless ‘Glassworks’ to the soundtrack for ‘The Truman Show’.”
The British Library presents:
Late at the Library: The Radiophonic Workshop & Guests
Entrance Hall @ The British Library, 96 Euston Road, Kings Cross, London, NW1 2DB, England
Friday 13th October 2017, 6.30pm – information
“The Radiophonic Workshop are one of the most influential electronic music groups of all time. Founded in 1958 by Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Oram, it was home to a maverick group of experimental composers, sound engineers and musical innovators including the late Delia Derbyshire. In a series of small studios within the labyrinthine corridors of the BBC Maida Vale complex, the Workshop set about exploring new ways of using – and abusing – technology to create new sounds.
“Their influence on popular music has been profound. As the in-house composers of music and effects for the BBC they created the sonic backdrops for ‘Doctor Who’, ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’, ‘Tomorrow’s World’ and countless others. From The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Prince and Pink Floyd through to some of the most innovative contemporary electronic artists and DJs, the Workshop’s legacy continues to grow as new generations of musicians discover their catalogue of extraordinary recordings.
“Now, nearly two decades after the Workshop was decommissioned, original members Peter Howell, Roger Limb, Dr Dick Mills, Paddy Kingsland and long-time associate composer Mark Ayres are back working together. They soundtracked the childhoods of several generations, now they’re back to soundtrack your Friday night with a two part set. The first is a live version of their first studio album for twenty-five years, the improvised work ‘Burials On Several Earths’, with guest collaborator Martyn Ware (Heaven 17, The Human League and BEF). The second is a heritage archive set in which the Workshop perform some of their best known material – including the high water mark of early British electronica – the signature tune for ‘Doctor Who’.
“Join the Radiophonic Workshop at 6.30pm for a special in-conversation event ‘Soundhouses: The Radiophonic Workshop at 60’. Tickets include entry to the Late event. Visuals for the night are performed by Obsrvtry, a collaboration between Michael Faulkner (founder of D-Fuse) and Ben Sheppee (creator of Lightrhythm Visuals), with a guest DJ set from Tom Middleton of Global Communication.”
Next week in London, a window on some nascent opera work…
Second Movement present:
Rough For Opera #16: A Scratch Night For New Opera
Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, London NW8 8EH
Monday 9th October 2017, 7.30pm – information
“…’Rough For Opera is a performance platform for composers to share new work and opera in progress. Each event is a snapshot and celebration of contemporary opera making, with most work being brought from page to stage for the very first time. With an informal and intimate atmosphere and a Q&A following each performance, Rough For Opera is a great way for audiences to engage directly with opera makers and for composers to get invaluable feedback about their work at an early stage in its development.”
This month’s edition features the following short opera performances (between ten minutes and half and hour apiece):
Over the course of October (and at the beginning of December), a labour-of-love musical staging of the life of classical and folk singing legend Kathleen Ferrier is touring some of the more out-of-the-way venues in England. From the sound of it, it’s a pretty portable show, so if you’re interested in booking it for your own venue, drop the production company a line.
“This new one-woman play with music tells the story of the great English contralto, whose voice and recordings are treasured to this day. Kathleen Ferrier was one of Britain’s phenomenal women of the twentieth Century. ‘Whattalife!‘ tells her story from her debut as a singer in 1940, her meteoric rise and her tragic death in 1953. ‘Whattalife!’ is the first staged dramatisation of Ferrier’s life, evoking the spirit of the war and post war years. Just like Kathleen during her short but full life, the show has a great sense of fun and talks straight from the heart.
“Professional actress and contralto Lucy Stevens has researched and created a unique and totally engaging performance. The play is written in Kathleen’s own words taken from her letters and diaries. Sung music with piano accompaniment from her repertoire is woven through the text.”
There’s a ‘Guardian’ article on the piece here, in which Lucy reveals how the piece was put together and throws light on the life, moods and artistry of a strong-minded and talented woman who went her own way during a time when such things weren’t so readily accepted.
Cooper Hall, Selwood Manor, Frome, Somerset, BA11 3NL, England, Thursday 26th October 2017, 7.30pm – information
Anthony Minghella Theatre @ Quay Arts, Sea Street, Newport Harbour, Isle of Wight, PO30 5BD, England, Friday 27th October 2017, 7.30pm – information
Dorchester Arts, Corn Exchange, High East Street, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1HF, England, Sunday 3rd December 2017, 2.30pm – information
And purely to indulge myself, here’s Jocelyn Pook‘s mid-’90s setting of a Ferrier loop as part of her minimalist song-cycle ‘Deluge’: best known as the theme for a mobile phone advert (and, as the video image shows, as fodder for numerous new-age compilations), it’s a little classic of minimalist fusion.
Long before the knot of current pop culture wrangling over women’s control over the music they make, the late Lindsay Cooper was plugging away in her own corner, striving (and ultimately succeeding) for much the same thing in the often arid and unforgiving spaces of British art rock, improv and jazz. Later this month, the Half The Sky ensemble (led by vigorous curator/arranger /multi-instrumentalist Yumi Hara) will be bringing their showcase of her music both to London and to a small town outside Hamburg, re-animating the work she created for Henry Cow, News From Babel and Music For Films between the late ’70s and the mid-’80s.
Originally formed in 2015 for festival appearances in Japan and France, Half The Sky derive their name from the Maoist/feminist maxim, “women hold up half the sky”, as used by Lindsay as a composition title on Henry Cow’s ‘Western Culture’ album, back in 1978) and feature an impressive alliance of British and Japanese art-rock musicians. As well as Yumi on keyboards, lever harp and vocals, the ensemble features two members of Cicala-Mvta (Miwazow on koto, ching-dong percussion and voice; Wataru Okhuma on alto saxophone and clarinet), the Korekyojinn/Altered States bass guitarist Nasuno Mitsuru; Chlöe Herington (the reeds and melodica player from Knifeworld, Chrome Hoof and V Ä L V Ē) and finally two of Lindsay’s former Henry Cow/News From Babel colleagues (singer Dagmar Krause and drummer Chris Cutler). As Yumi points out, “the gender split follows Lindsay’s general practice and the example of the original bands – Henry Cow (50% female) and News from Babel (75% female).”
Yumi’s comments on the music:
“In 2013, soon after Lindsay passed away, Matthew Watkins made a call for arrangements of her mini-composition ‘Slice’ for a special edition of his podcast ‘Canterbury Sans Frontières‘. I made a transcription of the piece and recorded it for solo clavichord. Chris Cutler and I also played it in Japan and New York. A little later, inspired by the three memorial concerts Chris Cutler organised in 2014 with the original bands, I put Half The Sky together to play Lindsay’s music in Japan.
“With the exception of ‘Slice’, it was only after – and because of – the 2014 concerts that any working scores for the Henry Cow pieces became available, having been painstakingly assembled from Lindsay’s notebooks, original band-members’ surviving parts and careful analysis of the recordings. A handful of the News from Babel songs – none of which had ever been performed live – had already been reconstructed for the memorial concert by Zeena Parkins; the rest I had to work out from scratch – as well as rearranging everything for a mixture of occidental and oriental instruments.
“This programme is approached very much as a music of the present – and not as an academic reconstruction.”
In addition to Half The Sky’s performance, the London show will feature DJ sets from two of London’s more interesting musical personalities. Marina Organ’s known both for three decades of staunch work as writer/co-driving force of ‘Organ’ magazine and for her indefatigable DJ/interviewing work on ‘The Other Rock Show’. James Larcombe is the keyboard player and sometime composer with Stars In Battledress, Arch Garrison, North Sea Radio Orchestra, Zag & The Coloured Beads and the William D. Drake band; now he seems to be extending his talents (or at least his brassy neck), to disc-spinning.
Half the Sky: Music of Lindsay Cooper
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England, Thursday 22nd June 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
Avantgarde Festival, Steinhorster Weg 2, 23847 Schiphorst, Deutschland, Sunday 25th June 2017, 2.15pm – information here and here
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Pinning down the nature of a woman’s work in art – or women’s work in general – is not always an easy thing, nor even desirable. Even the most positive intentions can produce more restrictive categories, more unwanted boxings and demands to conform. In the case of Lindsay, whose career always foregrounded honest effort and end product over personality showboating, and which was tinted by doubt and determination, it’s probably best to concentrate mostly on the mind behind the music: to listen to the querying voice coming through.
Operating over a set of times in which both contemporaries and colleagues had a tendency towards answers and stances, stated in both bald pronouncements and modernist-baroque ornamentations, she opted to bring a more questioning tone which nonetheless carried some of its possible answers in both action and presentation. Hers was a polymathic but purer musicality: an instrumental voice which voyaged alongside others’ often harsher pronouncements, détournements and doctrines and drew from them while never being subject to them, and which always kept a gentler, more accommodating side open to allow growing space and to consistently rebuild.
Although she also put in stints with both the cheery Canterbury fusioneering of National Health and the terrifying dark-folk band Comus during the 1970s, Lindsay was probably best known for her work with the powerful political chamber-prog of proto-Rock In Opposition ensemble Henry Cow (a creative ferment which she joined and left twice and, like most Cow-ers, never entirely left behind). Having initially brought in her toolkit of reeds, woodwind and piano skills to play on the band’s second album ‘Unrest’, she subsequently made small inroads into the writing, contributing to a number of group compositions on ‘In Praise of Learning’ and the ‘Concerts’ set. As a composer, though, she finally came into her own on the band’s final, all-instrumental statement ‘Western Culture’, on which she was responsible for most of the piled jazzy grandeur of the second side (finding previously unexplored links between the music of New York, Canterbury and Switzerland).
Lindsay Cooper
Perhaps more significantly, by this point in the late ’70s Lindsay had already formed the witty, subversive Feminist Improvising Group, or FIG; a project which she co-ran with vocalist Maggie Nichols in parallel with her Cow work. Generally considered to be the preoccupation and property of educated, intense, white men, the British and European free improvising of the time tended to be a little short on jokes (bar occasional pranking along the lines of the Free Art Research Trio). FIG allied Lindsay and Maggie with various other musical and performance talents – “feminist rock” trumpeter Corine Liensol (who’d played in Jam Today with a young Deirdre Cartwright), pianist Cathy Williams (who’d worked with another Cow-er, Geoff Leigh, in the Rag Doll duo), future filmmaker Sally Potter, latterday Cow cellist Georgie Born and Swiss free-jazz pianist Irène Schweizer (the last being allegedly the only European female improviser on the ‘60s and ‘70s scene). In classic feminist tradition, FIG not only enabled previously sidelined female voices onto the improv scene but deliberately upturned expectations as to what such a scene could achieve.
In comparison to the demanding and abstruse Maoist politics of Henry Cow (which, in private, sometimes resembled a brutally masculine university debating society preoccupied with games of political high-grounding), FIG were spontaneous, mutually supportive and – just as importantly – funny. With a strong and personal rooting in lesbian, class-based and feminist activism (plus parallel feelings of sidelining and denial on the part of others) but a suspicion of dogma, they expressed frustration and political challenge by drawing on a collective sense of the absurd and of the sympathetic. In addition to the music, their shows featured parodic stagings and examinations of domestic work (such as kitchenwork and cleaning) and of consumer preoccupations. Vegetables were peeled onstage; household tools such as dustpans and brooms pressed into service as props and noisemakers; oppressive or manipulative memes transformed into call-and-response singing.
Reading accounts of FIG work reveals a tale of tough gigs, audience misunderstandings and frequent frustration. Men carped, frowned and cold-shouldered; women laughed, argued and sometimes welcomed; the group members continually challenged their own sense of self and role; but the work itself sounds joyously unshackled – something I would have loved to have been around to see. It’s a shame that much improv and theatrical work is always of the moment and tends to vanish like dew in the morn. Without recorded evidence or restaging, it fades into hearsay, and in this case an important chapter in Lindsay’s work has to dwell in a kind of word-of-mouth samizdat.
Post-Cow and FIG, Lindsay ran her own Film Music Orchestra to create and record arthouse soundtracks (often working in cinematic cahoots with Sally Potter). She rejoined another former Cow colleague ((the now-mellowed Chris Cutler) for the 1980s post-Marxist art-song project News From Babel: here, Chris’ social and political musings would make a happier marriage with the pop-cabaret end of Lindsay’s music. She also contributed to the counter-cultural jazz colours of various Mike Westbrook and John Wolf Brennan bands, played with Pere Ubu ranter David Thomas, worked in theatre and (in the ’90s) composed a more formal chamber music which nonetheless retained the edge and inquiring spirit of her work in avant-rock and political art. She’d collaborate with Potter again for the Cold War song cycle ‘Oh, Moscow’ in the late ’80s, to which Chris Cutler also contributed. If encroaching multiple sclerosis (which had privately dogged her throughout her post-Cow career) hadn’t dragged her into early retirement in the late ’90s, there would have been more.
Half The Sky provide a welcome re-introduction to Lindsay’s work, performed by committed people whose sympathy with Lindsay Cooper’s music is absolute. However, they should also be viewed as a window onto the wider career of a quietly remarkable woman whose death in 2013 forced a premature coda onto the work of a mind whose personal humility had been more than balanced by its nimbleness, thoughtful and flexibility. Come along to these concerts and hear some of that mindwork and heartwork come alive again.
The June Kammer Klang is a double event centred loosely around Danish composers Else Marie Pade and Henning Christiansen, who variously pioneered mid-twentieth century electronic music and cross-genre intermedia Fluxus experiments.
Kammer Klang presents:
‘Soarings: A Salon on Else Marie Pade’ Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Monday 5th June 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here and
Apartment House (performing Henning Christiansen) + Jacob Kierkegaard (presenting Else Marie Pade) + Vitalija Glovackyte + Aguirre DJs Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Tuesday 6th June 2017, 7.30pm – information here and here
“The sounds outside became concrete music, and in the evening I could imagine that the stars and the moon and the sky uttered sounds and those turned into electronic music.” – Else Marie Pade.
Increasingly recognised as Denmark’s first composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade imagined “aural pictures” during a childhood afflicted by illness, and later learned jazz piano. Operating within the Danish resistance in the Second World War while still a teenager, she was captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in the Frøslevlejren internment: an experience which must have had a long-lasting and damaging effect since it undermined her post-war attempts to train as a classical pianist. Undaunted, she concentrated on composing instead: finding her particular niche after hearing a 1952 Danmarks Radio programme on Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète and realising that he’d given aural shape to the same ideas she’d had as a child. From the mid-1950s she was in at the start of art programmes on Danish television, establishing a lifelong position for herself both as a Danmarks Radio producer and as a pre-eminent radio and television composer (at a time when that strand of musical work offered as much genuine creative opportunity as anything in the avant-garde).
Over the course of her lifetime Pade produced a wide variety of sensuous, stimulating electronic compositions to entwine with various broadcast work: avant-garde documentary work, audiovisual ballet and more. Having studied with Schaeffer during the 1950s, she also attended the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt during the 1960s and early 1970s, studying under Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and György Ligeti (and impressing Stockhausen enough that he’d use her own ‘Glass Bead Game’ piece as a lecture topic). Apparently taken for granted in her home country, Pade’s reputation was greater abroad – her work was eventually compiled in a three-LP retrospective on Important Records (‘Electronic Works 1958-1995’) in 2014, two years before her death.
Regarding the ‘Soarings’ salon:
“…”Soarings” is a rough translation of the Danish word “svævninger” – a word coined by Pade to encompass both the phenomenon of different frequencies colliding to make an interference beat, and the more poetic image of soaring through the air. The ‘Soarings’ salon event is a special opportunity to hear more about her work via talks, film screening and discussion.
“The evening begins with a talk from artist and composer Jacob Kirkegaard, a long-time friend and colleague of Pade’s. Jacob will speak about Pade’s life and work from his unique perspective, having both produced her three-LP retrospective and collaborated with her on their joint composition ‘Svævninger’ (released by Important Records in 2012, and from which the evening takes its name). His presentation will include new images (including recently digitised scores) never previously shown in public.
“The evening will include the UK premiere of Pade’s extraordinary audiovisual piece ‘En dag på Dyrehavsbakken’: one of her very earliest works, which was first broadcast in 1955 by DR (the Danish Broadcasting Corporation). It consists of pictures and sounds recorded over two summers at Dyrehavsbakken, near Klampenborg in Denmark, and also includes electronically-produced sine tones and echo effects. This makes it the first piece of musique concrete and electronic music made by a Danish composer.
“The salon will conclude with a panel discussion with diverse contributions and reflections on Pade’s work and its wider context from Danish musicologist (and ‘Seismograf‘ editor) Sanne Krogh Groth, sound designer/studio manager Jo Langton and ‘Wire’/’Sight & Sound’ writer Frances Morgan. There’ll also be a reading by sound artist Ain Bailey (whose work includes sonic autobiographies and investigations of both architectural acoustics and the role of sound in the formation of identity).”
Jacob Kierkegaard returns for the full Kammer Klang show the following night, where he’ll be presenting Pade’s 1962 work ‘Faust Suite’, generally considered her masterpiece and described by Jennifer Hor of ‘The Sound Projector’ as “beautiful and mysterious, elegant and eerie music that can express deep solitude or wonder… a secret three-dimensional universe where the most amazing experiences may be had.” Over half an hour of sensually chiming oscillator churn (with nimble, challenging digressions of timbre, tone and emphasis), it places Pade’s work in parallel to the electrophonic imaginings of Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram – similarly thoughtful, similarly detailed and discursive; part of a wave of highly individual and original female composers and sonic réalisatrices with much of their work taking place within broadcast media, dancing apart yet in step.
Opening the show is composer/performer Vitalija Glovackyte, who “creates deep-felt chirpy music, bringing together conventional and homemade instruments, electronics, lo-fi devices and visuals. Her works span intimate solo sets and large-scale multimedia performances. Aside from her solo work, Vitalija co-runs the Almost Credible Music Ensemble and is one-half of the experimental pop duo Kinder Meccano.”
The track above stems from an eighteen month residency Vitalija spent with modern chamber ensemble Apartment House, who are also contributing to the evening in a seven-piece formation of Gordon MacKay (violin), Lucy Railton (cello), Frank Gratkowski (bass clarinet), Simon Limbrick (percussion), Kerry Yong (keyboard/piano), Loré Lixenberg (voice) and AH founder Anton Lukoszevieze as conceptualizer and director. They’ll be presenting the UK premiere of Anton’s adaptation of ‘Requiem of Art (NYC) – Fluxorum Organum’, a Henning Christiansen piece originally performed in 1967 (and reworked three years ago by Anton for an Ultima New York performance).
An adherent to the Fluxus art movement, Christiansen spent his artistic life rejecting standard distinctions of stylistic boundaries (including those between nominally different art forms) and the concept of the lone genius. Instead, much of his work was based on direct, implied or encouraged collaboration, whether he was encouraging others to freely interpret his ideas or whether he was actually working in equalized tandem with another artist. In its original form, ‘Fluxorum Organum’ is an example of the latter situation (having been created as the soundtrack portion to a film collaboration between Christiansen and conceptual art godfather Joseph Beuys) while its Lukoszevieze reinterpretation brings it back under the first method. You can view the original Beuys/Christiansen collaboration below:
The month’s Kammer Klang DJ slot is taken care of by representatives of Belgian record label/mail order distributors Aguirre who release and/or stock a wide range of electronic, ambient, experimental to rock, jazz, new wave and reggae. (including Pade and Christiansen recordings plus reissues from the revered French avant-garde record label Shandar. They’ll be playing various selections both from their catalogue and from their enthusiasms.
Programme:
Fresh Klang: Vitalija Glovackyte
Henning Christiansen – ‘Requiem of Art (NYC) – Fluxorum Organum’ (1967-68) adapted by Anton Lukoszevieze for Ultima New York at Issue Project Room, 2014 (UK premiere) – performed by Apartment House
Else Marie Pade – ‘Faust Suite’ (1962) performed by Jacob Kirkegaard
DJs: Aguirre
Some shows and events to start June off. In Birmingham, experimental dream pop/post rock band Pram (one of the most original and charming groups ever to work in either genre) have resurfaced and are taking over an Edgbaston park for a very different kind of performance. Back in London there are opportunities to catch up with Zarjaz Baby (one of the wilder characters from the original wave of British post-punk) an acoustic set from Jon Slade (who’s navigated his way through a heap of scenes from art-punk to Riot Grrl to a thousand indie DJ nights); and a recreation of the cello/pop songs of Arthur Russell, one of the darlings of the 1980s New York loft music scene.
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for-Wards, MAC Birmingham and Pram present:
Pram: ‘Under the Blossom That Hangs On The Bough’ Martineau Gardens, 27 Priory Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B5 7UG, England
Saturday 3rd June 2017, 4:30pm – free event – information here, here and here
“Composers and sonic artists Pram have been exploring south Birmingham with the help of local community groups to uncover the sounds of the locality. The results are both familiar and surprising.
“Let Pram take you on a journey through the city, a sound trail through the four wards of Birmingham’s Edgbaston district. Hear the world from the perspective of a bee as it flutters and forages. The snuffles of a tiny baby become the snores of a lion, the gurgle of a stream a mighty cataract. Come along and follow the woodland trail, bring a picnic and settle down for a performance inspired by the sound of the city as you’ve never heard it before.
“Set in the magical surroundings of Martineau Gardens, ‘Under the Blossom that Hangs on the Bough’ is an installation and performance by Pram, celebrating the sounds of Edgbaston. It will take place at Martineau Gardens on the afternoon of Saturday 3rd June, concluding at 6.30pm with a Pram performance inspired by sound recordings made in the wards of Quinton, Harborne, Edgbaston and Bartley Green. Free admission if you register at Eventbrite…”
This isn’t quite the same Pram that charmed us and subverted pop for a surprisingly long stint in the ’90s and noughties across a string of albums which included ‘Dark Island’ and ‘Sargasso Sea’ and a sound that seemed to be part child’s murmur, part clinking post-kosmische stroll and part friendly haunted house. Most obviously, singer and lyricist Rosie Cuckston (she who used to mount her keyboard on an ironing board at concerts) is absent, having moved on into academia and a more direct form of the social activism which the band’s eclectic inclusiveness and tendency to take philosophical side roads only hinted. That said, the rest of the band’s original creative core (multi-instrumentalists Matt Eaton, Sam Owen and Max Simpson) are all present, having spent the interim years of Pram downtime working with wonky loops as Two Dogs, creating film and theatre sound and making sonic art out of books with the Sound Book Project.
This also isn’t the first time that the post-Rosie Pram’s reappeared. Earlier in May they made an appearance at Imaginary Musics in Switzerland, playing a “music for Kopfkino” audio-visual set in a festival dedicated to “cinematic, recomposed and fictional musics”, and it seems as if losing Rosie’s quiet reflective voice and cocooned lyrics has shifted them further over into the areas suggested by Matt’s sound design and by Sam and Max’s live sound art. On-spec, it seems as if they’ve succeeded in becoming a kind of “post-band”, with a foot in their old live work, song-structures and performance coherence, but leaning towards something far more abstract and ego-free. ‘Under the Blossom That Hangs On The Bough’ sounds as if it will be something fascinating to be immersed in – an urban psychedelic afternoon stroll with the family, an aural refraction of Birmingham through leaves, greenery and company.
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Zarjaz Baby + Jon Slade The Horse Hospital, The Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1JD, England
Saturday 3rd June 2017, 7.00pm – information
“An existentialist extravaganza featuring a solo acoustic set from Zarjaz Baby (Freakapuss and former Tronics). Zarjaz will be performing dark atmospheric songs, full of imagery, with jazz, blues, early ’60s beat and pop influences, with live performance artists, in a style not seen since the basement and candles days of Beatniks.
“Also featured on the night is a solo acoustic Love-Rock revival set from Jon Slade/Knight Of The Comet, incorporating songs from his former bands Huggy Bear and Comet Gain, plus a Fire Department number, some Electric Bull re-workings, as well as songs he wrote with Wolfy Jones.
“’60s European pop music in between sets, Francoise Hardy, Brigitte Bardot, Gillian Hills. Expect sombre girls dressed in black and boys in Breton shirts.”
For more information contact incoming@freakapuss.com
For more on Zarjaz’s chequered life and career, have a read of this interview he did with ‘The Quietus’ three years ago, featuring accounts of brushes with mental illness, of releasing surreal post-punk songs with titles like Shark Fucks, of arguing with ‘2000AD’ over his stage name, and of having his image ripped off by Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
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XOYO Live and Milestones present:
‘Arthur Russell – A Classic Reinterpreted’ XOYO, 32-37 Cowper Street, St Lukes, London, EC2A 4AP, England
Wednesday 7th June 2017, 7.00pm – information here and here
“It’s been said that “Arthur’s songs were so personal that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music.”
“Twenty-five years after Arthur Russell‘s death, some of the most exciting, forward-thinking faces in music are set to present a unique rendition of Arthur Russell’s timeless album ‘Calling Out Of Context’. A posthumous album that brought together twelve incredible tracks from across two previously unreleased LPs, ‘Calling Out Of Context’ represents Arthur in his prime. Two decades later and the music sounds as contemporary as ever – a huge inspiration for those performing on the night. We’re very excited to hear this new rendition.”
Bringing together elements of electropop, classical minimalism, post-disco, hip hop and singer-songwriter work, the ‘Calling Out Of Context’ songs span twenty years of Arthur’s composing and creative history while he was battling to fuse the parallel New York worlds of dance culture and art music between the late ’70s and the early ’90s – a pioneer of the freewheeling musical eclectism which today we pretty much take for granted. Take a look at this salvaged 1987 interview feature from the ‘Melody Maker’ for more on the topic, featuring reflections from Arthur and others on Indian music, the pulse shared by formal minimalism and New York dance clubs, and the social and cultural challenges of the time regarding blending “high” and “low” cultures.
One of the month’s more interesting London opera events…
Oedipa & Lucia Lucas present:
‘Binary Optional’ Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, Euston, London, NW1 2PY, England
Thurday 25th & Friday 26th May 2017, 9.00pm – information
From the press release, spliced with a little more research:
“Oedipa collaborates with the extraordinary female baritone Lucia Lucas (Wuppertaler Bühnen, Deutsche Oper, Chicago Opera Theatre) on an evening of song in transition: from masc to femme, classical to queer and oppression to freedom.
“A freelance opera singer based in Germany (who has previously held full-time contracts with the Badisches Staatstheater, Kalsruhe, Theater und Orchester Heidelberg and the Deutsche Oper, Berlin), Lucia Lucas is a strong dramatic baritone specializing in Verdi roles, and has sung roles including Ford in ‘Falstaff’, Iago in ‘Otello’, Escamillo in ‘Carmen’, Le Grand-Prêtre in ‘Samson et Dalilah’, Jochanaan in ‘Salome’, Alberich in ‘Das Rheingold’, Thoas in ‘Iphigenie en Tauride’, Figaro in ‘Le nozze di Figaro’, Leporello and Giovanni in ‘Don Giovanni’, Mephistopheles in ‘Faust’, Don Pizzaro in ‘Fidelio’ and Nick Shadow in ‘The Rake’s Progress’.
“Beyond this, Lucia is one of the small but growing number of transgender woman performing significant operatic roles (a list of singers which includes Breanna Sinclairé and Emily De Salvo, whose own unusual range covers baritone to soprano). As Lucia commented in an interview in ‘Slipped Disc’ a couple of years ago, “I am performing all of the same things. Still singing angry old men on stage, but fringe projects have also started appearing as possibilities”. ‘Binary Optional’ is one such project – singing Bizet, Britten, Wagner, Purcell and Adams, flirting with Sarah Vaughan and ‘Rocky Horror’, Lucia draws on her experience singing classical repertoire across the world to tell her incredible story and celebrate the fluidity and plurality of gender in opera.
“Oedipa is the alter ego of writer/director Finn Beames (who’s dedicated himself to working “against the male perspective”) and a diverse range of varying collaborators. As Oedipa, groups of artists create and produce live performances in theatre, opera and related forms, often with an emphasis on music.
“Based in London and working internationally, Finn won the 2015 Genesis Future Directors Award at the Young Vic for his production of Man: 3 Plays by Tennessee Williams in the Clare theatre. He also holds the 2015 Lina Bo Bardi Fellowship, granted by the British Council for research into the eponymous Brazilian architect and the creation of a piece of theatre. For his own company, bodycorps, he recently directed a sold-out run of a new opera about depression, funded by The Wellcome Trust and ACE. Finn has commissioned further new work for bodycorps, including a musical based on The Sorrows of Young Werther. In 2014 Finn wrote, directed and designed a new music theatre work for the London Sinfonietta with composer Gavin Higgins, which they are currently expanding into a triptych. Finn is a director/librettist on the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme at Aldeburgh Music, and a member of the Young Vic Directors Network and Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab in New York.”
It’s always good to hear that Homerton’s 33 Chatworth Road – a.k.a. “The Dentist” – is hosting another of its gig-cum-house-parties. I’ve still got fond memories of the first concert I ever went to there: a mixture of jazz atmospheres, experimental folk and mythic New York chamber pop from Sealionwoman, Foxout! and Liam Singer (which you can read all about here.)
I’ve been out of the loop regarding their activities for too long, but here’s quick news on another couple of imminent shows there in collaboration, one in collaboration with folk promoter Muckle Mouth and the other with the Tin Label. (There are another two coming in the following week…).
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Muckle Mouth and 33 Chatsworth Road present:
I’m This, I’m That (playing the songs of Moondog) + Ed Dowie 33 Chatsworth Road/The Dentist, 33 Chatsworth Road, Homerton, London, E5 0LH, England
Friday 19th May 2017, 7.00 pm – information here, here and here
Assembled rapidly from the gig publicity, and from Wikipedia:
“Louis Thomas Hardin, better known as Moondog, was an American composer, musician and poet. His music took inspiration from street sounds, such as the subway or a foghorn. It was characterized by what he called “snaketime” and described as “a slithery rhythm, in times that are not ordinary […] I’m not gonna die in 4/4 time.” Many of his works were highly contrapuntal, and he worked hard on perfecting his counterpoint. He was also the inventor of several musical instruments (including a small triangular-shaped harp known as the “oo”, another which he named the “ooo-ya-tsu”, and a triangular stringed instrument played with a bow that he called the “hüs” (after the Norwegian, “hus”, meaning “house”). Perhaps his best known creation is the “trimba”, a triangular percussion instrument that the composer invented in the late 40s..
“Moondog was blind from the age of sixteen. In New York from the late 1940s, until he left in 1972, he could often be found on 6th Avenue between 52nd and 55th Street wearing a cloak and Viking-style helmet, sometimes busking or selling music, but often just standing silent and still. He was widely recognized as “the Viking of 6th Avenue” by thousands of passersby and residents who weren’t aware of his musical career.
“Dedicated Moondog interpreters I’m This, I’m That return to The Dentist performing their own arrangements/transcriptions of Moondog compositions with support from Ed Dowie (a Daylight Music favourite – there’s more about him here). Due to massive demand, there will be a double performance – an early show and a late show, with the one you see depending on when you’ve bought your ticket. Doors open at 7.00pm for fire/drinks/chat…”
Schedule:
7.30pm – first Ed Dowie set
8.15pm – first I’m This I’m That set
9.15pm – second Ed Dowie set
10:00pm -second I’m This I’m That set
Here are a couple of clips from the previous I’m This I’m That Moondog show back in July 2015, plus a taste of Ed Dowie:
“This is the one and only live outing with full band for Vermillion – Alex Neilson (of Trembling Bells)’ solo record as Alex Rex. Aside from a Cerys Matthews session the following morning, the material from this fantastic record will never be performed again.”
“His debut solo album Vermilion presents him as a provocative, poetic lothario with the alter ego Alex Rex. On record, rose thorns grow in Rex’s throat and he sleeps with girls for their minds as well as their bodies… Written during a “particularly self-destructive” period in his life in late 2015, Vermilion begins with the Gregorian chant-inspired blues of The Screaming Cathedral, with a chorus telling of “horror heaped on horror”. Please God Make Me Good (But Not Yet) features a girl sticking pins into a voodoo sex doll of him, before he has a “hit on myself.”
“Getting the worst bits of himself out there was therapeutic and necessary for Neilson. “I wanted songs that spilt out of themselves. The records I cherish most are asymmetrical things, full of blemishes,” he says. But there’s plenty of perky, almost poppy moments too. Neilson wrote the skronky psych-blues of Song for Dora while reading “lots of Ovid and taking MDMA”, while Postcards from a dream has a remarkably radio-friendly, West Coast-brightened Hammond organ intro before it kills its A-list potential with lyrics about “a necklace of bungee cord” and Adam “cup[ping] his nuts behind the tree.” Sex is everywhere, but this shouldn’t surprising for a folk musician, Neilson laughs. “The oldest folk songs are lusty and carnal. And I like having sex! People do!”
This in from the promoters: “The Left Outsides have joined the bill, playing in an Alison/Mark guitar duo formation.” If you remember, these are further Daylight Music favourites, so I’ll just steal the blurb from a previous DM show I posted about – “Mark Nicholas and Alison Cotton (are) a London-based husband and wife duo whose atmospheric, hypnotic songs echo Nico’s icy European folk, pastoral psychedelia and chilly English fields at dawn.”
The third act is Plague Dogs, about whom I’ve been able to find out precisely nothing: but they must have impressed Muckle Mouth, since they’re also playing at the Family Élan gig the following. Maybe when I get around to posting about that I’ll have found out more…
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Kammer Klang presents:
Misfit City 